Crucible workflow - reviewer as moderator

[inet-logistics]

As far as we understood the default Crucible workflow, the author acts as moderator (if there is no separate moderator). This means that the author always has the lead - he creates a review and is responsible for summarizing and closing the review.

This works for some of our uses cases, but we also have use cases where the reviewer should be the moderator (in lead and in control of the review). This is currently not possible.

Example:

Technical lead writes the technical design, a developer implements the design. Afterwards, the technical lead wants to review if the author has implemented the task according to the design.

We would like to have the following workflow for this use case:

1. Technical lead creates review (developer as author, technical lead as moderator and reviewer).
2. Technical lead adds defects and completes review.
3. Author fixes defects and uploads new revision to the review.
4. Technical lead reviews changes and summarizes and closes the review.

So in summary we would need the following functions:

• reviewer as moderator
• right (for the author) to upload revisions without being able to edit other review details
• "Complete" button for the author to indicate all defects are fixed

Is it possible to configure Crucible in a way to enable this workflow? If not, are there any plans to implement a workflow like this in future versions of Crucible?

Thanks for your answer!

[inet-logistics]

Thanks for your comment!

Yes, this open JIRA issue basically describes what we want to do. But just like for the other commentators in this ticket, the proposed work arounds are at best just that - work arounds. But they don't provide a clean process where the moderator is also the reviewer.

We want to prevent the author from being able to summarize/close reviews. In our opinion, only the creator of the review (in this use case the reviewer is the creator) should be allowed to summarize and close the review.
We managed that by creating a permission scheme that gives the rights to edit, summarize, and close reviews only to the Creator role. So we can set the author as moderator, but still only the reviewer (as creator) is able to summarize and close the review.
But this leads to other problems like the author not being able to add files or changesets to the review ...

[Jeff Thomas]

Does this open JIRA issue describe what you're wanting to do?

Would the below work around do what you need?

When creating a review you can set the moderator to be the author of the review to the person who wrote the code. Then add yourself as a reviewer. After that you can leave comments and only chose to Complete the review when you are ready.

Alternatively, you can switch off the moderator role for the project:
http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/CRUCIBLE/Enabling+the+Moderator+Role#EnablingtheModeratorRole-RemovingtheModeratorfromanExistingProject

Additionally, you could also give yourself the permission to summarise and close any review in a project:
http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/CRUCIBLE/Creating+a+Permission+Scheme

By giving yourself (your user account) the Summarise and Close permissions.

This way you can close any outstanding review if your developers are forgetting to do that.