Tasktop Technologies, creators of the Eclipse Mylyn project and a leader in Agile Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) integration and productivity, and SmartBear Software today announced the Eclipse Mylyn Connector for SmartBear CodeCollaborator. Available in Tasktop Enterprise, the new connector brings task-focused interface technology to code reviews managed in CodeCollaborator, making code reviews a regular part of Eclipse-based development activities. The integrated Tasktop and CodeCollaborator offering helps development teams develop higher quality software that is delivered to market faster and more efficiently.

“This latest Tasktop Enterprise connector is the result of our collaboration with SmartBear and a joint enterprise customer who needed to improve developer productivity by taking advantage of the task-focused interface to get the most out of the code review process,” said Mik Kersten, CEO of Tasktop Technologies and founder of the open source Eclipse Mylyn project. “Many organizations deploying Agile practices will find the task management and automated knowledge capture provided by Tasktop to be a developer-friendly on-ramp to SmartBear’s leading code review tool.”

Tens of thousands of software developers, systems analysts, firmware and hardware designers use SmartBear’s CodeCollaborator to conduct peer reviews on code, images, design documents and schematics, and identify software defects early in the development lifecycle. The Tasktop Enterprise task management and ALM integration tool helps software developers using Eclipse become more productive by making it effortless for them to organize their work around tasks and automatically present the most relevant source code and project management information associated with each task. Together, Tasktop Enterprise and CodeCollaborator help streamline the code review process, increase software quality and reduce time-consuming and expensive bug fixes that frequently occur late in the product development cycle.

Features and benefits of the Eclipse Mylyn Connector for CodeCollaborator include:

• Ability to quickly and easily conduct code reviews as the Eclipse IDE only shows the source code that needs review.
• Task list integration that provides in-IDE awareness of new reviews and status changes for existing reviews, helping developers incorporate reviews into their regular work flow.
• Ability to have code reviews linked to relevant defects and stories, making it easy to learn more about the bug or feature under review, or to determine which features have been reviewed.
• Combined Tasktop and SmartBear product also is available from the Mylyn Connector Discovery tool, making it effortless to download and install from within the Eclipse IDE.

“Integrating the CodeCollaborator code review process in Eclipse creates a seamless experience for developers,” said James Wang, GM and VP, CodeCollaborator Products. “The new certified Tasktop Mylyn Connector for Eclipse combines task-focused development best practices with CodeCollaborator’s peer and code review capabilities, providing users with a proven method for improving their software quality.”

This new collaboration extends Tasktop’s benefits by incorporating the important code review process as part of an integrated and task-focused Agile ALM stack. The connector is Tasktop Certified and can be downloaded directly as part of Tasktop Enterprise.