AccuRev Inc. and Smart Bear Software announced a technology partnership designed to improve software development process collaboration and efficiency. The combined solution integrates Smart Bear's Collaborator tool-which facilitates peer code review-with AccuRev's process-centric software change and configuration management capabilities. The integration of these two offerings is intended to enhance real-time collaboration for software teams that conduct code reviews, with particular benefits for those working on Agile, geographically distributed, offshore or parallel projects.
In large IT development environments, "accuracy is important, process is important, making sure that they're not spending a lot of time on the wrong things," Damon Poole, CTO of AccuRev, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "With this effort, the process can be tedious, you've got all these changes coming in, and you may do reviews twice or three times on the same code without realizing it, or reviewing code that has nothing to do with the change. It can be a logistical nightmare. Sometimes you just throw up your hands, and say 'we'll do our best, but we've got to concentrate on writing code."
The AccuRev process-centric architecture enables code review elements to be inserted, moved or removed within the development process on the fly, providing customers with more code review process flexibility without the need of an administrator, the vendor says.
The combined AccuRev and Smart Bear offering simplifies and expedites the code review setup process, enabling developers to specify review participants and share files to be reviewed. Using Code Collaborator, developers can share comments and ideas with each other in real time or newsgroup-style for offline reading. Reviews happen more quickly and in more depth, which is ideal for the short timeframes of Agile and continuous integration environments. "AccuRev knows what changes you're making-we know what you're doing, we know what you've changed, we know what your process is," Poole explains.
The Smart Bear and AccuRev integration provides more visibility and control over a collaborative development process, whether a development team is separated by office walls or geographic boundaries. The combined solution makes code review a more natural extension of the software development process within AccuRev, enabling peer code review when, where, and how a development team wants.
"We set the stage for Collaborator to enable you to have a great experience during the code review process," Poole says. "It brings the level of complexity down, it makes it more likely you're going to do the code reviews, and get the benefits of the code reviews. Because if you're doing all this work to do the code reviews, and you have fewer bugs, but it costs you too much, then you're not getting that benefit. This makes it much more likely that you're going to get a net benefit."
AccuRev enables teams to insert a code review stage in their development process on the fly. The software ensures that code reviews are completed easily and reliably, based on either bulk submissions or by using AccuRev's change package capabilities on a change-by-change basis. This capability to accommodate code reviews any where in the process increases team agility and facilitates greater parallel development, since teams can continue working while previous changes are being reviewed.
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