Digital.ai Agility vs. GitLab

Scenarios where it works well: 1) Retros can be very well facilitated & notes/action items
can be captured against the sprint. 2) Product Owner can effectively track the story
progress with all the test-cases, design etc. 3) Being good scaling support, it provides good visibility
across multiple teams, programs and agile portfolios, providing a centralized
environment where all our stakeholders can easily work together regardless of location. 4) It provides easy tracking all of your epics,
stories, themes, defects, tasks, tests and issues 5) I like its intuitive UI as for moving stories
around, burning hours. 6) It allows top leadership to visualize
and report their strategic plans, giving all stakeholders the relevant data
that they need to stay dedicated to the project priorities. 7) It can be easily integrated with slack
so for few teams we used slack for collaboration Scenarios where it did not work well: 1) Test Management need improvement in
terms of tracking tests, team had hard time tracking regression test cases. 2) Version one comes with lot of features like
Rally but here we don’t get customizations which is there in Jira where from workflow
to issue everything can be customized based on your team/program/portfolio
requirements. 3) Lot of navigation to access basic
stuff. Example I want to go to bug attachment , there are lt of clicks &
navigation need to do which should be pretty straightforward I feel.

Incentivized

One scenario that implements GitLab well in our environment is the ability to use GitLab in conjunction with our Argo runner. We are able to do builds in Jenkins that update specific values in our yaml files in GitLab that are automatically seen and implemented. We keep each environment on a different branch which helps with clarity and pushing stages up to production. We have had issues with other products in the past in trying to make this work as smoothly as it does with GitLab

Incentivized

• Automated saving of changes, no records can be lost because all items are saved in real-time.
• The watch function, optional but beneficial when managing multiple teams or projects.

Incentivized

• GitLab excels in managing code versions, allowing easy tracking of changes, branch management, and merging contributions.
• It helps maintain code stability and reliability, saving time and effort in the development or research workflow.
• Powerful code review features, enabling collaboration and feedback among team members.
• Robust project management features, including issue tracking, kanban boards, and milestones.

Incentivized

• Saving of changes is inconsistent. Sometimes the changes appear to save automatically and other times the user needs to click the "Apply" button. Until the user is familiar with when this needs to happen, work can easily be lost.
• This may be a setup configuration issue, but it would be good to be able to set the default team when creating stories. Too often stories are created and the user forgets to enter the team and they need to search the entire database for the story that was just created.

Incentivized

• CI variables management is sometimes hard to use, for example, with File type variables. The scope of each variable is also hard to guess.
• Access Token: there are too many types (Personal, Project, global..), and it is hard to identify the scope and where it comes from once created.
• Runners: auto-scaled runners are for the moment hard to put in place, and monitoring is not easy.

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

I find it easy to use, I haven't had to do the integration work, so that's why it is a 9/10, cause I can't speak to how easy that part was or the initial set up, but day to day use is great!

Incentivized

VersionOne provides outstanding training. They have Product Owner training that I recommend every Product Owner attend. They have scrum master training and other agile training that was well worth the money paid because it made the teams more productive. And the support for the tool is incredible. These people live and breathe Agile and are evangelists and enthusiasts.

Incentivized

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

Basecamp functions much differently from Version One and serves a different purpose, so it's kind of like comparing apples and oranges. However, both V1 and Basecamp have their pros and cons. V1 makes it easier to manage Agile processes, but Basecamp is more user-friendly and can be used for broader purposes. At our organization, we utilize both products. V1 is what we use to manage processes internally, and Basecamp is what we use to manage client-facing processes. If our organization wasn't Agile, I would prefer to use Basecamp for all project management (internal and client-facing), and have done so at previous organizations for which I've worked

Incentivized

GitLab is a self-hosted solution when compared with GitHub, but it has all the feature GitLab have. Overall this use case is the same, but I you do not want to store your code on the GitHub server, it is the best solution. Easily manageable but bound to resource restriction. For small teams, I recommend GitHub over Gitlab, but if you have the structure of regular deployment, go with Gitlab.

Incentivized

• I came in near the end of our use of VersionOne (we are migrating to Jira), and I don't operate or think at the business return (ROI) level. I'm not the one to comment on this!
• I suspect that V1 added much clarity to the prioritization of work, and added visibility across entire teams. So I assume that it had a positive impact on returns.

Incentivized

• GitLab issue management has made release smoother, with about a factor 2 less time used by the relevant person
• The outward facing issue desk now has several hundred public issues answered, and thus alleviates the team, as users can refer to older questions
• Use of CI has made commitment of faulty code drop drastically

Incentivized