Tips and Tricks

This section will describe workarounds and tricks we use for Code Collaborator.

Pool of Users

Using a pool of users allows a review to be sent out to multiple people, but only require one to finish the review.  People can then "volunteer" to review the review.  This is especially useful when a review needs to be finished, but it doesn't call for a specific reviewer.

While we don't have a specific feature in Code Collaborator to do this, there's a good way to approximate review pools.  To do so, set up a "pool" user whose email address is a mailing list of all the possible reviewers.  This "user" is the one you should assign to the review.  When the review starts, everyone gets the email.  Whoever wants to "take" the review (and it can be more than one) will go into the review, click "edit" on the participant list, and change out the pool user for their own username.  Then they can do the review, and when they're finished, the review is done.

This is best because you have the log of who it was that did the review.  More than one CAN do it if they wish, which is a nice option.

There are no licensing problems because no one will actually log in as the pool user.  If you don't log in, you don't count against licensing (in either fixed or floating), so although there's this user in the user list it never counts towards licensing!

The proposed "review pool" feature would make this "pool" an explicit concept in Code Collaborator so you don't need to set up a separate mailing list.  Also we could have a "take it" button on the review to make it that much easier.  But the workaround above isn't too much work.

Picking reviews through the Command Line Client

When sending files to a review through the Command Line Client, use "last" instead of the review ID to pick the last review or "ask" to be prompted with choices to pick.

Custom Fields with Date and Times

CodeCollaborator does not have date or time custom fields, but you can closely approximate a date or time by using regular expression validation of single line text fields. For dates, the following regular expression requires a date in the 20th or 21st century that is approximately valid (yes, it accpets 31 days each month):

(?:19|20)\d\d-(?:0[1-9]|1[012])-(?:0[1-9]|[12][0-9]|3[01])

The following regular expresion validates a time on a 24 hour clock:

(?:[01][0-9]|2[0-3]):[0-5][0-9]

The two could be combined to accept a date and time field. Be sure you set the description of the field to describe exactly the format you're looking for so that users do not have to parse the regular expression to know what to enter.

Checklists

In Code Collaborator, checklists are not built into the system, but there are two ways people do this:

  1. Have a "checklist URL" custom field in the review summary. The review creator uses this to link in checklists from an intranet. The reviewers can click that link to pull up the checklist and either print it out or place it on their screen(s) in a visible location.

  2. Upload the checklist(s) to the review as regular documents. The reviewers similarly can open those files on-screen and/or print them out.