Collaborator by SmartBear Extends Award-Winning Review Capabilities to All Development Team Members

BEVERLY, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--SmartBear Software, provider of software quality tools used by more than one million developers and testers worldwide, today released Collaborator, an easy-to-use tool that expands upon the award-winning review features of CodeCollaborator, the first enterprise-class commercial code review tool. Collaborator delivers the proven code review experience to documents authored by members of the extended development team, including user documentation, specifications and test plans. With this release, SmartBear has solidified its commitment to peer review by delivering innovation to all members of the software project team including product managers/owners, QA, support, documentation and marketing.

“With Collaborator, non-developer authors now can realize the enormous benefits that CodeCollaborator users have leveraged for years with the leading tool in code review.”

“Collaborative review enables key benefits to the range of team members beyond coders who create work that helps drive software quality and success,” said Melinda Ballou, Program Director for IDC's Application Lifecycle Management and Executive Strategies Service. “Product owners create user stories, testers create test plans, technical communicators create user documentation and other team members – from development to operations to business – are required to provide feedback on these deliverables. Having a tool that all members of the DevOps team can use to share and collaborate on these deliverables will help assure the quality of the final product.”

Unlike other means of reviewing documents, Collaborator allows all reviewers to provide their feedback in a centralized tool, meticulously tracking each comment until resolution. This allows all reviewers to see each other’s comments and to interact using a chat-style interface if they happen to be reviewing the artifact at the same time. Gone are boring review meetings, endless email threads and misplaced comments.

“CodeCollaborator’s easy-to-use review methods have consistently led to greater adoption of code review as a practice, improved collaboration among developers, better code quality and have helped increase the skill of developers and development teams,” said James Wang, General Manager and Vice President, Peer Review Products at SmartBear. “With Collaborator, non-developer authors now can realize the enormous benefits that CodeCollaborator users have leveraged for years with the leading tool in code review.”

Collaborator includes all of CodeCollaborator’s features for code review, including out-of-the-box support for 16 SCMs, integration with major IDEs, customizable workflows, defect management and extensive reporting through its audit trail. Collaborator adds support for reviewing Microsoft Word and PDF documents and plans to offer the same functionality for Excel, PowerPoint, Visio and other documents in the near future.

A free upgrade to Collaborator is available for CodeCollaborator customers with a valid support and maintenance contract. For more information or to trial Collaborator for free, visit: http://smartbear.com/products/software-development/code-review/free-codecollaborator-trial.

About SmartBear Software

More than one million developers, testers and operations professionals use SmartBear tools to ensure the quality and performance of their APIs, desktop, mobile, Web and cloud-based applications. With five million downloads and counting, SmartBear products are affordable, easy-to-use and ready for deployment. Free tools and plug-ins are also available for download on the website. Learn more about SmartBear, the company’s award-winning tools or join the active user community at http://www.smartbear.com, on Facebook or follow us on Twitter @smartbear or Google+.

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