SmartBear Collaborator 10 Enables Collaboration Across Dev Teams

SmartBear Software, a provider of software quality tools for developers, announced the release of a major revision of its developer collaboration tool, Collaborator 10.0.

SmartBear’s Collaborator enables development, testing and management teams to work better together to produce high quality code, applications and services. The tool enables users to review user stories and requirements, review code, communicate within and across teams, and deliver quality software all from one interface.

The new release introduces Community, Team and Enterprise editions to better serve software development teams of all sizes. In addition, SmartBear Collaborator provides integration with Microsoft Visual Studio, IBM Rational Team Concert and the ability to review Microsoft Word and Adobe PDF files.

“This major release of Collaborator 10.0 delivers new functionality including full integration with Visual Studio, which makes review creation and participation very easy,” said Justin Collier, product owner for Collaborator at SmartBear, in a statement. “This leads to higher review participation across development teams and ultimately more reliable and higher quality products.”

Collier noted that the new Team version of Collaborator extends the product to organizations that do not need require all of the functionality of Collaborator’s more comprehensive Enterprise edition. The Enterprise edition is aimed at organizations that require scalable and customizable code and documentation team review, he said.

Collaborator also integrates with a host of other version control systems and integrated development environments (IDEs), including Gut, Subversion, Microsoft team Foundation server, Perforce, GitHub, Eclipse, and bug tracking systems such as Jira and BugZilla.

SmartBear is demonstrating SmartBear Collaborator 10.0 at the Visual Studio Live conference this week in Cambridge, Mass.

Meanwhile, SmartBear also released the results of a recent survey on the benefits of doing code reviews. In the survey of more than 600 developers, testers and IT operations professionals, 90 percent said the biggest benefit of code reviews is improved software quality. Seventy-two percent said their biggest benefit was sharing knowledge across teams, and 59 percent said enhanced maintainability of code was big for them.

Last month, SmartBear announced it had acquired CrossBrowserTesting, an automated cloud testing platform. The acquisition enabled CrossBrowserTesting to further accelerate and scale its Web and mobile cloud testing solution using SmartBear’s global resources. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

At the time of the acquisition, SmartBear said CrossBrowserTesting had more than 200,000 users, with more than 5 million tests run to date. CrossBrowserTesting provides a cloud testing environment with more than 1,500 mobile and desktop browsers in more than 65 operating systems, including iOS, Android and Windows.

“CrossBrowserTesting offers customers an easy way to use a cloud service for testing applications written for browsers and real mobile devices,” said Doug McNary, CEO of SmartBear, in a statement after the acquisition. “It has continued to win the trust of customers by building a reliable, affordable and easy-to-use automated testing cloud platform.”

McNary said SmartBear intends to maintain CrossBrowserTesting as a standalone service, while providing the resources and investments necessary to help CrossBrowserTesting build up its business operating as a standalone entity inside SmartBear.