JOLT Winner
Code Collaborator (Smart Bear)
Jason Cohen
Reviewed by Rick Wayne
Let's bury, for all time, the old cliche: software development is a solitary activity. In truth, it is a social one, our team can far outsmart the mere sum of our brains. Smart Bear's Code Collaborator exploits that synergy by boiling the waste and goo out of the code-review process, bagging you the benefits of many eyes on each developer's code while neatly sidestepping much of the practice's traditional friction. Review eliminates bugs early, true. But traditional sit-in-a-room reviews are excruciatingly costly (and simply excruciating for the developer under the microscope). Conversely, "how's this look?" e-mails rarely catch much. Code Collaborator assembles just enough structure to encourage conscientious review, while staying largely out of the reviewers' way. The code itself forms the skeleton, while comment threads appear beside it, linked to the appropriate line. The conversation can be synchronous via chat, or can accumulate throughout the working day. When it's finished, stats collected can help you figure defect density, time spent on review, and other useful metrics. Smart Bear has made it as painless as possible to integrate review into your existing processes; for example, you can use pre- or post-commit revision-control triggers to fire up reviews automatically, and the Eclipse plug-in lets developers review from within the comfort of their favorite IDE. In short, the code gets examined without breaking the bank.
CodeBeamer 5.0 (Intland)
Reviewed by Gary Pollice
CodeBeamer 5.0 is a worthy entry into the team collaboration tools market. It has all of the features one expects from collaboration tools: task management, code repository, document management, and many others. CodeBeamer adapts to the team process rather than forcing any specific process upon an organization. CodeBeamer also stands out among the competition because of its ability to play nicely with other products. It has plug-ins for popular IDEs like Eclipse and NetBeans and integrates with tools like Microsoft Word. It also complements the NetBeans collaboration tools nicely. CodeBeamer has one of the better browser-based user interfaces that will allow all team members to use it with minimum ramp-up time. Any team that is dispersed around a building or around the world should look at CodeBeamer to help increase effective collaboration.
Confluence (Atlassian)
Reviewed by Mike Riley
Confluence is a mature, general-purpose, Java-based enterprise wiki and blogging facility that offers organizations a secure, easy-to-administer discussion and group documentation management platform well beyond what most web folks think of. Thanks to its open API, a wealthy ecosystem of extensions that includes those for Google Maps and Microsoft Visio make integrating those documents and services painless. With all these new features continuing to set the bar higher for other wikis to attain, fellow Jolt judge Rick Wayne put it best when he stated, "I continue to love Confluence."
TeamCity (JetBrains)
Reviewed by Mike Riley
Plenty of solutions exist that address the interdependent complexities associated with continuous integration, but few have the insight and build management features that TeamCity supplies for Java and .NET developers. In addition to delivering the expected access management security considerations and monitoring of builds, TeamCity can deliver code coverage statistics and build status (even while builds are running) via useful, information-rich charts, email notifications, and even RSS feeds. It supports the JUnit, NAnt, Nunit, and TestNG testing frameworks, can connect to a number of version control systems, and integrate with Eclipse, Microsoft Visual Studio and JetBrain's own IntelliJ IDEA.
