Atlassian Crucible (discontinued) vs. IBM Bob

Crucible is well suited for situations where development teams follow a branch-based merge process, where new features or automation stories are introduced. It allows more seasoned team members to check newer team members' code to ensure standards are followed. It is probably less appropriate for smaller development teams or smaller projects, where code reviews can be less formal.

Incentivized

The first time using it feels like magic. Its ability to analyze an existing codebase and adapt accordingly to questions, feature requests, issues, etc. is remarkable. However, it is not limited to an existing codebase - I've had it create new applications based on styling from another application from scratch. It has quickly gone from an amazing novelty to something that is relied upon daily.

Incentivized

• Supports all major source control systems such as SVN and Git.
• Integration with Jira, Bamboo, Bitbucket, to have a complete end to end development experience.
• Easy to use UI/UX for reviewing code changes amongst different team members.

Incentivized

• Analyzing existing programs, explaining clearly what it does.
• Rewriting programs in a more modern language and/or a much more modular design, adding lots of explanatory comments.
• Analyzing large amounts of data, verifying assumptions are either true or false.
• Improving my ability to write good prompts, by asking IBM Bob feedback about the prompt(s) I used.

Incentivized

• Crucible notifications of changes or updates to the code review are delayed as well as loading more source code is slow.
• Crucible is formatting could use improvements for viewing customization features. For instance, allowing the user to create a new tab per file to be reviewed would be nice to have.

Incentivized

• The setup of skills can be more simplified
• since the IBM Bob IDE is embedded in a VSCode based framework, we have to deal with the same UI (and missing guided workflows)
• The help pages are only available via URLs. I like to see an embedded help file which is structured and includes a search feature

It works well, for the most part, but asking for authorization for multiple steps or tool installation and use sometimes becomes bothersome. You can grant blanket authorizations but I do prefer to have a tradeoff there so not all is bad, but sometimes I get the impression that we get asked the same question several times during the same workflow.

Incentivized

Good support overall being an Atlassian product, with options including free/paid official support and community provided help.

Incentivized

Crucible was first on the market and the price is inexpensive. Crucible integrates with Jira Software and Atlassian Fisheye, providing the ability to track defects efficiently. SonarQube compares code to 'best standards' but not 'internal standards' and does not integrate to issue tracking. GitHub offers effective peer review, and has some integration with GitHub issues but costs more.

Incentivized

ChatGPT just did not have the breadth and depth of insight for my coding needs. To get an approximation of what I wanted I had to restate my prompt multiple times, and it looked almost like it did not learn from one time to the other.

Incentivized

• It has had a large ROI for our team, as it has helped us find issues sooner than we would have had we not reviewed things properly.

Incentivized

• We've been able to grow our own development team from within as a result of using this technology. Team members who may not have been confident enough to meaningfully contribute to the existing codebase have now become high-output developers.
• We've been able to grow an automated test suite to more thoroughly test our mobile application. What once took two weeks of manual regression testing can now be done in an afternoon.
• Our documentation has improved considerably, giving the product a more polished feel. Product documentation had previously consistently lagged behind new feature development.

Incentivized