Bitbucket Server (formerly Stash) from Atlassian was a self-hosted source code management solution. The product is no longer available for sale, and support for existing licenses ended in 2024.
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OpenText Dimensions CM
Score 8.0 out of 10
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Dimensions CM is Software Change and Configuration Management for Agile development, developed by Serena Software and now sold by OpenText.
Bitbucket Server would be good to use if you are not extremely reliant on the availability of your code at any given moment. If you have other systems relying on the up status of Bitbucket Server that can cause problems if unable to reach it -- you might consider going with a different product
Serena CM is well suited to highly controlled, audited, and process driven environments. It will allow strict segregation of duties, and change traceability. If implemented correctly it will help you quickly build trusts with your auditors. It is also well suited to environments that require constant branching and merging. Due to the complexity of the product and learning curve for your development and operations team it may be overkill in a small shop with loose rules
Code Promotion: Dimensions CM allows supervisors to control changes to code, in that they delegate requests to developers, and act as a gatekeeper prior to promoting to the next environment. This functionality is configurable so you can set up a workflow that best fits the structure and requirements of your own company.
Code Repository for changes and versioning: Code can be checked out by item or by synchronizing folders. Code revisions can be compared against other revisions or work files. Item histories show which developers made which modifications, and which supervisor and operations personnel were involved in assigning the request and promoting the code to each environment. Additionally a pedigree will show a stream diagram which graphically displays branches and merges.
Deployment: Serena Change Management offers help automating deployment including integrations with SVN and Jenkins. Its newer versions also have a powerful graphical deployment automation tool (Serena Deployment Automation- SDA). It comes with a certain amount of licenses built-in. If you have a many nodes to deploy to there will be separate licensing costs for that.
The only major negative that I have encountered with Serena CM product is that the very power and flexibility of the tool means there is a risk that you will make a mess of things. In other words it gives you plenty of rope to tangle yourself with. I recommend careful, well thought out deployments implementing the built in roles and workflows that can be turned on and configured, using a consistent methodology.
My experience with the Serena help desk support has not been impressive. Though reasonably polite and diligent, the technicians were well trained, and often gave bad advise and terrible scripts. On several occasions I had to rewrite scripts they have me; if I had run them as provided they would have caused even more difficulties than the problem I was trying to solve. I speak of the support in the past tense because I conditioned myself not to call them, it was usually just easier to solve nay problems my self. They do have a good account management team though, and for any major issues you can go thru them.
The usability of its interface is pretty straight forward when it comes to creating projects and repositories, but when you have to dive into finer grained portions of the UI things can get tricky. If you are used to using tools like GitHub or Gitlab -- Bitbucket is just different enough to be a bother.
Never really needed any support as the application is very easy to set up and maintain. Any questions we had were well documented in their online documentation, and community forum.
Stash was selected before I was at the company, but we're looking at these alternatives and actively considering switching. Stash seems to have all the necessary features we need to make it work, but it doesn't have any bells and whistles or extra special features that we can use to create more advanced integrations with other products like Jenkins or Amazon Web Services.
Serena CM is superior to Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS) in overall functionality, but does not have very good native integration with Microsoft. Therefore in a Microsoft centric shop with no audit needs ,TFS would be better. Otherwise I would choose Serena CM
Stash has certainly improved the productivity of the team. We no longer have to use Shared Drive on network which is prone to hacks and errors to manage our code.
During the process of releases, the release engineering team can pull the latest and approved code from Stash and need not be dependent upon the availability of the developers during their non availability. It improves productivity and fastens the ETA for requests.
We have stayed on course for project deadlines since introduction of Stash and helps us achieve the goals of timely completion of projects.
Serena has facilitated our annual completion of various audit and technology control certifications. These certifications make a huge difference to our company's reputation and bottom line.
