We at Review Board are pleased to announce that Clearvision has released the latest version of their UCM4SVN (Unified Change Management for Subversion) product with out-of-the-box support for Review Board. From their press release:
In April 2010 Cleavision released version 2.2 of UCM4SVN which included an integration with the open source code review tool Review Board.
UCM4SVN is a lightweight process layer which sits above the open source configuration management tool Subversion and enables development teams to quickly and easily structure their code and work items.
UCM4SVN removes all of the complication within Subversion associated with branching, merging, release management, permission management, change management integration etc. by providing a single browser based interface.
The new integration with Review Board will allow developers, team leaders and project managers to perform code reviews as part of the natural but managed process instigated by UCM4SVN. The high level steps are as follows;
- Via UCM4SVN a team leader assigns development ‘activities’ which either originate from one of the integrated change management tools (IBM Rational ClearQuest, Atlassian Jira, Trac) or as a UCM4SVN created activity;
- Via UCM4SVN the developer accepts the activity and UCM4SVN performs a Subversion checkout;
- The developer uses their preferred Subversion IDE (Tortoise, Eclipse, command line) etc. to work on the change set or file for the activity and eventually completes the work and performs a final SVN commit;
- The developer, via UCM4SVN chooses to perform a ‘Close’ or ‘Deliver’ action and integrate the activity of changes into a common integration branch;
- The act of ‘Close’ or ‘Deliver’ automatically creates a ‘Review Board’ request ticket for the team member acting as a reviewer;
- The reviewer, via UCM4SVN, can decide to perform a review by selecting the ticket. Such action automatically opens Review Board and from this point Review Board manages the review process and stores all review comments;
- The interaction between Review Board and UCM4SVN is most valuable when a reviewer decides to fail a review. Under these circumstances, a UCM4SVN change request is automatically created and assigned to the original code developer to ensure the code changes are implemented;
- UCM4SVN manages the entire process to ensure the original activity and the code change requests from Review Board are implemented into the final integration branch.
Through the integration between UCM4SVN and Review Board the reviewer’s comments and requests to improve the quality of code are never forgotten or misplaced, a full audit trail is clearly recorded.
The natural development process managed by UCM4SVN is strong and agile enough for companies of all sizes.
Clearvision initially considered developing their own code review tool however, after researching the market and evaluating a number of similar products, realised the Review Board product was an ideal fit and matched Clearvision’s goal of producing simple but effective applications.
Clearvision would like to give special thanks to all those involved in Review Board.
Clearvision provide Subversion training, subversion consulting, subversion support and a range of subversion products including integrations between ClearQuest, Jira, Trac, Subversion, Git and a variety of migration tools. UCM4SVN will shortly be extended to provide Application lifecycle Management for the open source configuration management product Git.
For any questions related to open source development within the software change and configuration management arena please contact www.clearvision-cm.com or sales@clearvision-cm.com.