New in Syndeia 3.5, Part 2 – SmartBear Collaborator

As Intercax prepares to roll out Syndeia release 3.5, we’re giving our blog followers an advance look at new features. Part 1 covered Vitech GENESYS, using the Generic RESTful API integration. In this part, we describe Syndeia’s new integration for SmartBear Collaborator. The accompanying video provides an overview of the Collaborator integration using the Syndeia Web Dashboard, but it is also available from the Syndeia plugin clients for Cameo and Rhapsody.

SmartBear Collaborator is a code and document review tool widely used by software development teams. It enables organizations to review source code, requirements, test plans, and other documentation with tracking of participants and review submissions. While having internal integrations to several ALM tools, the new Syndeia integration allows the reviews to become part of a larger digital thread with version-sensitive traceability and access through the Syndeia Cloud REST API.

The video begins on the Repositories page, where we identify the Collaborator category and select a specific repository in this category. Our log-in credentials for Collaborator have been entered previously and Collaborator @ Intercax appears in the Tree view column. It expands to show Reviews, Participants, and Defects.

From this repository view, we can see all the contents of the Collaborator repository, whether or not an object has been connected to models in other tools. We can

  • View the properties of the Collaborator element, including its name, external key, type, and URL
  • Search the repository by ID or Name, and
  • See what the element is connected to, both intra-model and inter-model

We can also launch the Collaborator webpage in our default browser directly from the tree view.

In this case, the review Hello Collaborator has six intra-model connections, five to participants in the review and 1 to a defect reported in the review. There are also six existing inter-model connections, to a Jama requirement, a SysML element and four JIRA elements. We can add a seventh from the web dashboard using the Add icon, which open a new window. From the dashboard, we create a connection to a Confluence web-page. In Syndeia release 3.5, this feature works only for reference inter-model connections. Intra-model connections and model transform inter-model connections are not possible for the Collaborator integration but may be available in future releases.

The video goes on to demonstrate an alternate view of the network of connections involving Collaborator elements called the Digital Thread Explorer. If we right-click on a Collaborator review, and choose Graph View, the window shifts to show a single node. We expand it to see all the connections to it, both the intra-model connections to other Collaborator elements and the inter-model connections, in this case, to Jama, SysML, JIRA and the Confluence page we just connected. We can also expand the new nodes to interactively follow a chain of connections.

While not shown in the video, this integration can also be used through the Syndeia Cameo and Rhapsody plugin dashboards, which include the ability to compare and update version-sensitive reference connections to Collaborator reviews.

Watch the Full Video Demonstrations here:

Future blog posts in this series will introduce more new features in Syndeia 3.5, including more new integrations and new options for authentication and containerization. Keep watching as we continue to build The Digital Thread Platform for Model Based Engineering!

Other parts in this series:

Part 1 : Syndeia – Vitech GENESYS Integration

Part 2 : Syndeia – SmartBear Collaborator Integration (This Part)

Part 3 : Syndeia – ESTECO VOLTA Integration

Part 4 : Syndeia – RESTful Integration

Part 5 – Single Sign On with SAML2

Dirk Zwemer

Dr. Dirk Zwemer (dirk.zwemer@intercax.com) is COO and Co-founder of Intercax LLC (Atlanta, GA), a supplier of MBE engineering software platforms like Syndeia and ParaMagic. He is an active teacher and consultant in the field and holds Level 4 Model Builder-Advanced certification as an OMG System Modeling Professional.