This request could probably be generalized to allow sharing of multiple window
types, however, I wanted to capture specific customer feedback. John works for
Nortel in Ottawa, CA...

10:57:47 AM  
John Adams how do you see this kind of thing integrating with Version Control
systems, we currently all use Clearcase
 10:58:15 AM  
Brian Leonard NetBeans in general or Collab?
 10:58:26 AM  
John Adams collab integration with something like clearcase
 10:58:53 AM  
John Adams I know that netbeans has clearcase modules ...
 10:59:08 AM  
Brian Leonard Give me a use case.
 10:59:20 AM  
Brian Leonard As it stands, you can change source on my machine.
 10:59:33 AM  
Brian Leonard I could then check in those changes (I guess taking credit for them  )
 10:59:39 AM  
Brian Leonard or blame
 11:01:02 AM  
John Adams the use case we run with every day goes something like 1) customer
complaint raised 2) test & integrate the code 3) run a code inspection somehow
... printout, collect diffs on a machine 4) retest with code changes 5) archive
the fact a code inspection happens for TL9000, along with the changes 6) repeat.
  The two disjoint portions there tend to be the version control & the traceability
 11:01:47 AM  
John Adams different tools/ methodologies for code inspection vs traceability,
given that we do the work in clearcase
 11:04:30 AM  
Brian Leonard Right, is there a way (me the developer and you the reviewer)
could view the diff output from clearcase?
 11:06:09 AM  
Brian Leonard Collab could be extended to support such as use case. Today, I
would just ask you to run a diff against what I integrated. I could then share
the new file so we could review it together.
 11:06:30 AM  
John Adams I'm not sure I understand your question.  We (developer and reviewer)
generally have views into clearcase.  Provided the code is checked into version
control, we can both independently do diffs against the current and previous
versions.  This is ok, but gets a little problematic on the larger submissions.
 When you change 25+ files in a source tree of 000's of files, it is a pain to
navigate through all of it.  It's better if somehow someone "drives"
 11:07:32 AM  
John Adams What happens in practice I believe is thats someone generates a list
of files with versions to look at, reviewers pre review the code against that
list, and feed back comments.  It takes a while though
 11:07:42 AM  
Brian Leonard Right, it would be best if the diff output window could be shared.
 11:08:27 AM  
John Adams exactly ... as well as a running report / journalling of the changes
introduced while the review is being completed.  That part is surprisingly
important for traceability.
 11:09:15 AM  
John Adams (or not introduced, which is sometimes as important ... we're not
going to do it in this release because it's risky, but we'll introduce it next
release)
 11:10:21 AM  
Brian Leonard Right. Now you're getting into the bigger picture of application
lifecycle management (alm).
 11:11:17 AM  
John Adams yeah.  As a developer the journaling is not important to me that
often.  As a person who cares about process and audits (and ironically
possessing the checkbook more often than not) I care about it a great deal
 11:12:27 AM  
Brian Leonard Right, so the point is to make the journaling automatic for the
developer.
 11:12:54 AM  
John Adams although, if the journalling of changes entered went into source
control ... that might be interesting.  Sometimes when you go back through the
code to figure out why a change was made, something included automatically in
the cersion notes particular to a class may be interesting.    I hadn't thought
of that.
 11:13:14 AM  
John Adams an option to consider in the future :)
 11:13:43 AM  
John Adams anyways, I need to get ready for a meeting in a bit, so I'll need to
sign off
 11:14:01 AM  
John Adams sorry to ramble on :)
 11:14:07 AM  
Brian Leonard For production code, we have very strict rules as to what must be
documented in vcs for that reason.
 11:14:47 AM  
Brian Leonard No problem. It's been enlightening. I suppose I'll meet you in
September. Thanks for the test.
 11:15:06 AM  
John Adams no problem ... have yourself a great day.  (morning I suppose if
you're on the west coast)
 11:21:39 AM  John Adams left the conversation