johnmcdraper's avatar
johnmcdraper
Occasional Contributor
9 years ago
Status:
New Idea

Need Reference documents in a review

While performing inspections, you often need to reference other materials.    Other source code files, Requirements and Design documents, etc.    Currently Collaborator has no way to include these as part of a review.   

 

If you upload these reference documents, they become part of the review.   The only other option is to create a custom review field and use the text field to tell people where to find the reference material.   (We ended up zipping up reference material, checking it into SCM,  and putting a link to the zip file in this custom text field.

 

It would be nice to have a more elegant solution to include reference materials in with a particular review.  Ideally, a way to upload these files but not make them part of the review itself.

  • scline's avatar
    scline
    Occasional Contributor

    I totally agree. It gets confusing and authors have to add a note requesting that the support files be ignored. Half the time reviewers don't pay attention to those notes and waste time reviewing support files.


    johnmcdraper wrote:

    While performing inspections, you often need to reference other materials.    Other source code files, Requirements and Design documents, etc.    Currently Collaborator has no way to include these as part of a review.   

     

    If you upload these reference documents, they become part of the review.   The only other option is to create a custom review field and use the text field to tell people where to find the reference material.   (We ended up zipping up reference material, checking it into SCM,  and putting a link to the zip file in this custom text field.

     

    It would be nice to have a more elegant solution to include reference materials in with a particular review.  Ideally, a way to upload these files but not make them part of the review itself.


     

  • johnmcdraper's avatar
    johnmcdraper
    Occasional Contributor

    Please Kudos the idea, so SB knows others are interested in this feature.

     

    thanks

     

    - J

  • MrDubya's avatar
    MrDubya
    Occasional Contributor

    Interesting, when you upload files a review using the client, the last step is to include any reference files - but you are right, these are mixed in with the rest of the files so there is no good way to distinguish.  I would be for putting in a separate "reference files" section which would clearly identify files that are only for reference, and not part of the review.  You could have a separate "upload" button to easily include files in this section, and files uploaded to this section would not contribute towards the LOC and other auto-generated review metrics reported by Collaborator.

  • MrDubya's avatar
    MrDubya
    Occasional Contributor

    In the meantime, I also just remembered that each file uploaded includes a "Notes" field which you could use to identify reference files - but I still like the idea of including a separate section for reference files because they would be easier to identify / group, plus would not count towards review file metrics.

  • johnmcdraper's avatar
    johnmcdraper
    Occasional Contributor

    People tend to not see/read the NOTES area.    What we've done for now is to create a custom review field/text area for Reference material, and use text or URLs to send people to the reference materials.  

  • johnmcdraper's avatar
    johnmcdraper
    Occasional Contributor

    5 years and this is still an issue.    I need more Kudos here.  🙂