Recommendation for text-based software design review collaboration tool

Question

Much of the software design we do in our company is in Microsoft Word, embedding pictures and Visio diagrams where necessary.

Can anyone recommend a good software design review collaboration tool that allows multiple parties to give review feedback in parallel? Currently, we use various methods none of which are ideal:

• Using "Insert comment" feature in Word. Useful, but quite serialised and collating feedback from multiple parties often requires manual merging, or reading different versions of the document. Doesn't lend itself well to parallel reviews.
• Using a separate spreadsheet to track feedback, and responses. We can store the spreadsheet on a share drive, but this is still serialised as only a single reviewer can edit the spreadsheet at once.

I guess I'm looking for something like CodeStriker, but for designs rather than code implementation.

Any recommendations from personal experience? Free (or cheap) applications would be preferred, in these tough economic times ;-)

Answer 1

Are you opposed to online applications?

37signals.com has a suite of really great productivity solutions that match exactly what you're looking for. It's just if it's within your budget and if you're willing to go online with it.

I personally use backpack for my day to day management and life, it's a wonderful tool because I find I'm not the type of person to keep a paper day planner.

Stand alone apps I don't really know of any that stand out as a really good collab tool. I'm sure they exist, but chances are they're very pricey.

Cheers!

Answer 2

For design document review I'd suggest either a wiki or google docs. Both have essentially the same features as word -- at least as far as one goes in a design document (images, diagrams, etc.) and both allow for concurrent editing and revision history tracking.

We've got an internal wiki where all designs begin and have the wiki configured to send all edits to everyone's email. The emails are easy enough to ignore when you're overloaded but many is the time that someone has seen and edit and chimed in with something like "this problem is strikingly similar to what was done four years ago when working on feature X" which really helps bring our institutional memory into play.

Answer 3

I've never used CodeStriker but it looks you could use it for design reviews as long as you wrote your design docs in plain-text or HTML.

Another option would be to use Google Docs which would let use easily embed images as well as comment on the changes using Insert->Comment. So, very similar to your current system but with the advantage that you get easy online collaboration for free.

Answer 4

To quote WD2002: Comparing and Merging Microsoft Word Documents:

If you want to compare an earlier version of a document with the current version of a document, you can compare the documents and then merge the changes into one document. For example, if you ask an associate to edit a document, but he doesn't track changes while editing, you can compare his edited document to your original to see what changes he made.

When you compare and merge documents, Word shows the differences between them as tracked changes. If multiple reviewers return their changes and comments in separate documents, you can merge all their changes into a single document and review their changes from that single document. You then can review changes from a specific reviewer.

While not ideal, this just uses functionality already available within MS-Word.

Answer 5

Do it in a text markup language, such as latex, or html.

Put the text markup file under revision control.

If you have graphical files. Generate images from the graphics program in a format compatible with the text markup language (e.g. eps, jpg, png, pdf). Put these files under revision control as well.

Whoever does a checkin can then merge their changes with the other contributers.

Answer 6

Adobe has server-based review tools for PDFs. They let anyone add to a central location, print marked-up versions and accept/reject/etc. ones. Here's the flow looks like for a reviewer.