4 ms·

I've been looking hard at JetBrains' YouTrack. The bug/issue tracker we're currently using is not terrible, but it's a little painful. However, we've just bar

by douche 11y ago

I've been looking hard at JetBrains' YouTrack. 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.

structural 11y ago
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.
- douche 11y ago
  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.).
  - structural 11y ago
    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/ 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.
    - piotrkaminski 11y ago
      If your code is on GitHub, you might be interested in Reviewable (https://reviewable.io 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 https://github.com/servo) moved their code review process from Critic to Reviewable a couple months ago...
      - structural 11y ago

by douche 11y ago

structural 11y ago

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.

douche 11y ago
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.).
- structural 11y ago
  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/ 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.
  - piotrkaminski 11y ago
    If your code is on GitHub, you might be interested in Reviewable (https://reviewable.io 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 https://github.com/servo) moved their code review process from Critic to Reviewable a couple months ago...
    - structural 11y ago