4 ms·

Phabricator is amazing as an all-in-one solution for a small shop.

nuritzi 6y ago
I think Phabricator is a really powerful tool for engineering teams, but when you try to do more cross-functional team collaboration, it's not as user-friendly as GitLab. I used Phabricator at a previous company and miss some functionality, like Phabricator's ability to show issue dependencies in a more intuitive and granular way -- but at that company, we had a lot of trouble getting the Design team to use Phabricator, for example. As OSS communities continue to onboard newcomers, they're faced with a generation that expects modern interfaces that are user-friendly. Having user-friendly tooling also helps promote diversity of OSS communities since it's easier to onboard people with all sorts of backgrounds, since the technical adoption barrier is lowered. I think GitLab is a clear winner here since it's user friendly and designed for cross-functional team collaboration (GitLab dog foods their own product in all departments of the team, so you have HR, Marketing, Finance, etc all using it, in addition to the full product teams). Full disclosure: I work at GitLab as the OSS Program Manager. Part of the reason I joined was because I feel really strongly about GitLab's ability to lower the contribution barrier and get more people involved in OSS.
epage 6y ago
I'm curious about this because I've wanted to get off Phab as soon as I started using it - Whats your thoughts on "arc"? It seems like a whole can of worms of problems you can run into with basic branch flows. I know teams that have complex branch flows and it is a nightmare. Same for Windows users. - What do you use for a CI? How well does the integration work for you? - How is it with tracking conversations on Diffs? - Any particular plugins or bots for it that help make the difference?
- nuritzi 6y ago
  @epage -- Unfortunately I can't speak to the branch flow or bots question. Perhaps someone else here can? Other answers are below. -- Re: CI -- We dogfood GitLab CI via gitlab.com -- so no need for integrations. GitLab non-engineering teams use CI all the time because we constantly update the handbook to document all of our work. I would love to see this practice more often in OSS orgs, and other companies for that matter. Having a handbook-first approach (https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/handbook-first-documentation/ https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/handbook...) really helps enable remote team collaboration and makes it easier for newcomers to jump in. I think OSS orgs have done a good job of recognizing the importance of documentation for development projects, but there's an opportunity to increase documentation around workflows and community operations. -- Re: tracking conversations on Diffs -- Admittedly, I don't have a lot of experience with this outside of GitLab. But maybe that's the point. It's easy to chime in on diffs on merge requests on GitLab, and one of my favorite features is "suggesting changes" where you can add in a suggested update to a diff and the author can choose whether or not to apply it. Here's a link with info about suggested changes: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/discussions/#suggest-changes https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/discussions/#suggest-changes It's within the larger doc addressing discussions in GitLab in general: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/discussions/ https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/discussions/ -- Btw, for anyone interested, here's more info on using GitLab for project management: - https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/project-management/ https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/project-management/ - https://www.buggycoder.com/project-management-with-gitlab/ https://www.buggycoder.com/project-management-with-gitlab/ - https://thenewstack.io/gitlab-issue-board-project-management-tool-built-experience/ https://thenewstack.io/gitlab-issue-board-project-management... I gave a presentation about cross-functional team collaboration using GitLab at GNOME's GUADEC this year. Here are the slides: https://events.gnome.org/event/1/contributions/70/ https://events.gnome.org/event/1/contributions/70/ .. As a program manager, I'm generally really excited about this topic! -- Some of the features I talk about are not available as part of the Community Edition, but there's the GitLab for Open Source program which gives OSS projects access to our top tiers, plus 50K CI mins per month, for free. I'm hoping to make the program's page more discoverable, but in the meantime, here's the link: https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/open-source/ https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/open-source/

I think Phabricator is a really powerful tool for engineering teams, but when you try to do more cross-functional team collaboration, it's not as user-friendly as GitLab. I used Phabricator at a previous company and miss some functionality, like Phabricator's ability to show issue dependencies in a more intuitive and granular way -- but at that company, we had a lot of trouble getting the Design team to use Phabricator, for example. As OSS communities continue to onboard newcomers, they're faced with a generation that expects modern interfaces that are user-friendly. Having user-friendly tooling also helps promote diversity of OSS communities since it's easier to onboard people with all sorts of backgrounds, since the technical adoption barrier is lowered. I think GitLab is a clear winner here since it's user friendly and designed for cross-functional team collaboration (GitLab dog foods their own product in all departments of the team, so you have HR, Marketing, Finance, etc all using it, in addition to the full product teams). Full disclosure: I work at GitLab as the OSS Program Manager. Part of the reason I joined was because I feel really strongly about GitLab's ability to lower the contribution barrier and get more people involved in OSS.

epage 6y ago

I'm curious about this because I've wanted to get off Phab as soon as I started using it - Whats your thoughts on "arc"? It seems like a whole can of worms of problems you can run into with basic branch flows. I know teams that have complex branch flows and it is a nightmare. Same for Windows users. - What do you use for a CI? How well does the integration work for you? - How is it with tracking conversations on Diffs? - Any particular plugins or bots for it that help make the difference?

nuritzi 6y ago
@epage -- Unfortunately I can't speak to the branch flow or bots question. Perhaps someone else here can? Other answers are below. -- Re: CI -- We dogfood GitLab CI via gitlab.com -- so no need for integrations. GitLab non-engineering teams use CI all the time because we constantly update the handbook to document all of our work. I would love to see this practice more often in OSS orgs, and other companies for that matter. Having a handbook-first approach (https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/handbook-first-documentation/ https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/handbook...) really helps enable remote team collaboration and makes it easier for newcomers to jump in. I think OSS orgs have done a good job of recognizing the importance of documentation for development projects, but there's an opportunity to increase documentation around workflows and community operations. -- Re: tracking conversations on Diffs -- Admittedly, I don't have a lot of experience with this outside of GitLab. But maybe that's the point. It's easy to chime in on diffs on merge requests on GitLab, and one of my favorite features is "suggesting changes" where you can add in a suggested update to a diff and the author can choose whether or not to apply it. Here's a link with info about suggested changes: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/discussions/#suggest-changes https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/discussions/#suggest-changes It's within the larger doc addressing discussions in GitLab in general: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/discussions/ https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/discussions/ -- Btw, for anyone interested, here's more info on using GitLab for project management: - https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/project-management/ https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/project-management/ - https://www.buggycoder.com/project-management-with-gitlab/ https://www.buggycoder.com/project-management-with-gitlab/ - https://thenewstack.io/gitlab-issue-board-project-management-tool-built-experience/ https://thenewstack.io/gitlab-issue-board-project-management... I gave a presentation about cross-functional team collaboration using GitLab at GNOME's GUADEC this year. Here are the slides: https://events.gnome.org/event/1/contributions/70/ https://events.gnome.org/event/1/contributions/70/ .. As a program manager, I'm generally really excited about this topic! -- Some of the features I talk about are not available as part of the Community Edition, but there's the GitLab for Open Source program which gives OSS projects access to our top tiers, plus 50K CI mins per month, for free. I'm hoping to make the program's page more discoverable, but in the meantime, here's the link: https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/open-source/ https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/open-source/