codeBeamer ALM vs. GitLab

In my opinion codeBeamer is well suited for any activity where detailed tracking is needed with teams involved. It can be less suited for small projects which do not last long, or are not continuous, etc

Initial team collaboration was very difficult before the Gitlab integration. There is no code version maintained by the developer leading to problematic situations when actual deployment needs to be done. The initial setup was a learning curve, but the overall integration helped to work with the team. The CI/CD pipeline also helped to easy deployment.

Incentivized

• Tracing of requirements.
• Tracking of development.
• Tracking of QA.
• Tracking of bugs.
• Tracking of releases.
• Wiki.
• Users and teams.
• Works for teams scattered across the globe.
• Testing and coverage for releases.
• Integration with SVN.

• The way they have managed to provide the version management aspect using git with project setup and users is mesmerising cause there's no product out there that gives this freely.
• Continuous updates and hearing what users need is what the product engineers at GitLab are doing best. They come back to you with exactly what you need every while.
• Quality features, Latest tech integrations have made the end-to-end solution very flexible and agile.
• CI/CD tools implementation with pipelines and deployment strategies is just making the job for Infra teams smoother.

Incentivized

• Search.
• Metric calculation.
• Would be nice that cB is a source of truth, i.e., that say SVN commit is done only from cB; know this is difficult to achieve.

• Documentation of CI features have room for improvement, in particular in cases where own runners with pre-deployed images are used
• Project management features, such as milestones etc. seem un-intuitive, and we struggle to get developers to actually use them
• Settings for having GitLab send email notifications ought to be more fine-grained. Seems like it is a choice between emails for everything, and no emails at all

Incentivized

Gitlab is the best in its segment. They have a free version, they have open-source software, they provide a good service with their SaaS product, they are a fully-remote company since the beginning (which means they are fully distributed and have forward-thinking IMO). I would certainly recommend them to everyone.

Incentivized

Sometimes info in codeBeamer can be lost, in principle, if not well organized by the user, info can never be found, or can be forgotten about, etc

The web console management is superior and I would have given Gitlab a 10, but sometimes it is hard to find documentation about a configuration setting in the gitlab.rb configuration file. As we move everything to code that means moving our CVS tools to code as well - and Gitlab to code. The usability of Gitlab from the end user's perspective is superior and the usability from the operations team is very good and getting better but there could be a little improvement in the gitlab.rb config file layout and documentation.

Incentivized

Excellent support professionally. Also, thanks for giving me for free access to SaaS cB for my hobbyist project.

At this point, I do not have much experience with Gitlab support as I have never had to engage them. They have documentation that is helpful, not quite as extensive as other documentation, but helpful nonetheless. They also seem to be relatively responsive on social media platforms (twitter) and really thrived when GitHub was acquired by Microsoft

Incentivized

codeBeamer is by far better.

We have a small custom code development group. We only needed a basic entry-level code management repository. Gitlab meets our needs and is very price advantageous compared to others on the market. We also needed a system that is easy to administer and easy to grant access to our limited-size user base. Gitlab does what we need and gives the necessary flexibility for application support, user administration, and code/version control needs to be required.

• Customer tracking.
• Process tracking.
• Workflow framework.
• Can be overhead.

• We are moving towards Gitlab only as our SCM & CI tool. So it would be an alternative to Jenkins. Saving our licensing cost there.
• We have also stopped using Confluence & using Gitlab for our documentation purposes. Reducing cost there as well.

Incentivized