The bug/issue tracker we're currently using is not terrible, but it's a little painful. However, we've just barely gotten people trained to use the current system. I can either accept the current, somewhat clunky system, or go through another year of retraining and hope the slicker tool and the additional features are a net win.
At least JetBrains actively works on their products. Our current tool hasn't changed in three years, and that was just a reskin of the UI to a more bootstrappy css.
My day job / team uses YouTrack. We'd love to replace it (because the admin side of running an instance is pretty terrible), but it's been by far easier for people to use than anything else we compared to.
Huge downsides:
- Doing centralized authentication in a large-organization environment is basically impossible. Its LDAP implementation is broken for anything else than a couple very standard schemas that they've tested against & you can't make it authenticate using a Windows domain. They've recently split out the user management, etc., components into a separate product called Hub, but it's the same code and suffers from the same problems. [NB: Hilariously enough, other JetBrains products work just fine in this regard.]
- The thing uses some custom proprietary database. Integrating backups into your normal workflow is painful. Upgrades are VERY painful (oops, the old version had a database that didn't enforce some constraints that the new one does, please go fix all your issues by hand), although there's some auxiliary API and tools for exporting individual issues as -- if I recall correctly -- JSON objects that was an 80% solution.
Upsides:
- The UI does the expected thing by default in all cases we could find. It is also fast & responsive, relatively uncluttered, and doesn't have a bunch of extra things to click in order to create/comment on/edit issues.
- Searching for issues is very fast and powerful.
- Batch updating issues (which we tend to do a lot) is extremely easy. Make a custom search describing the issues to update, then update all of them with a couple clicks.
The admin downsides were (for us at least) bad enough that I'm not sure I'd recommend deploying it if you already have a working, integrated system. If you're starting from scratch, though, or committed to replacing another system for whatever reason, it's a pretty good choice.
Thanks, good to get some real impressions from someone who has used it. We already use TeamCity, which is why I was looking at it in the first place. I guess they haven't quite rolled the two together yet, so I might wait on that.
Upsource also looks very interesting, is that also something you have used? We don't really have a good tool for doing code review at the moment. Also, the VCS browsing capabilities look to be miles ahead of what our current setup offers (almost completely unusable, hijacks the browser back button, no searching, definitely no chance of static analysis, links sent out in email notifications constantly pointed at the wrong thing, etc.).
Upsource is good for browsing. We're still in the process of finding a "good" tool for code review (using a bunch of in-house stuff at the moment which is great for review, but bad for branch management). It uses the same authentication stuff, Hub, as YouTrack does.
Currently we're looking very hard at Critic (https://critic-review.org/ is a demo site, code's on github) because it looks to offer the closest workflow to what we use.
We're specifically looking for something sorta similar to Gerrit as far as how reviews work, but while actually supporting a feature-branch-heavy workflow where we tend to review branches rather than individual commits, and frequently rebuild/rebase feature branches.
Obviously, if your workflow is different then your needs for a review tool may differ wildly.
If your code is on GitHub, you might be interested in Reviewable (https://reviewable.io, disclosure: I built it). It's made for incremental full-branch review (though will also do per-commit if you wish) and deals gracefully with rebasing. As a bit of social proof, Mozilla's Servo project (https://github.com/servo) moved their code review process from Critic to Reviewable a couple months ago...
Anything where we can't host the tool and point it at git repositories on a server we control is a complete non-starter for us, unfortunately. This is mostly because our development and test environments are not connected to the Internet.
Other than that, I took a quick look at your product and it's feature-wise close to something I would want to use. Only comments I would make would be that non GitHub projects generally want the review tool to handle the branch management (a.k.a storing pull requests, flagging their status, etc.): of course only focusing on GitHub lets you not worry about that and get a product running much sooner... You should spend some serious time looking at your page load times as well - I'm 10msec away from your server and the demo code review at https://reviewable.io/reviews/Reviewable/demo/1 took nearly three full seconds to load, even with most static assets already cached since I didn't timeline it on the first attempt.
Thanks for taking a look! Unfortunately, developing self-contained tools that customers run behind a firewall is a complete non-starter for me. ;-)
Developing against the GitHub API does carry some non-trivial advantages: among other things, I never actually clone any repos. This wouldn't be possible with a raw git repo. I'm considering adapting the tool to AWS CodeCommit, though, which might be a decent middle ground. Making my own equivalent of pull requests is actually the least of the changes I'd need to make, though.
And yeah, performance is a never-ending battle... But considering that all the work is done in the browser (fetching sources, diffing, formatting, etc.) I think it's actually not too bad. Again, like running in the cloud, it's a trade-off of in favor of flexibility and development speed.
The bug/issue tracker we're currently using is not terrible, but it's a little painful. However, we've just barely gotten people trained to use the current system. I can either accept the current, somewhat clunky system, or go through another year of retraining and hope the slicker tool and the additional features are a net win.
At least JetBrains actively works on their products. Our current tool hasn't changed in three years, and that was just a reskin of the UI to a more bootstrappy css.