A fantastic source code management tool
February 01, 2018
A fantastic source code management tool
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Bitbucket
We use Bitbucket in all our offices worldwide to manage our source code migrated to Git - that is, almost all our code base, as we get rid of older versioning systems like CVS, SVN, Mercurial and Platinum. Bitbucket gives a front-end that helps a lot the collaboration between developers on a common code base: helping see the code in central repositories, visualize the branching network, manage pull requests, perform the associated code reviews, and plug external tools (like Jenkins) thanks to its system of hooks.
- In my experience, Bitbucket has shown as very stable. In more than 2 years of regular usage, with more than 5,000 people contributing on an immense code base, I have only experienced one unscheduled outage as a user, lasting less than 1 hour.
- Bitbucket proposes a handy visualization tool to help see branches, merges of the various contributions.
- The code review feature of Bitbucket is fairly good, allowing to comment modified code, reply to comments. This helps developers discuss on changes until they reach a consensus.
- Bitbucket also integrates with HipChat. Pull requests can trigger notifications in HipChat rooms.
- It is possible to add hooks, and integrate specific actions through various plugins. A Jenkins plugin allows to set up a continuous integration system, and contribute in a Devops initiative.
- Bitbucket does not highlight well lines of code for which only the indent change. This makes it painful to review some pull requests, as large blocks of code can be highlighted as changed.
- When accessing a project or repository for which you don't have access, Bitbucket just gives you an error, but gives no way of notifying the project/repository owner that you would like to get access, or getting the name(s) of the project/repository owner(s).
- The search engine is quite limited. It seems it searches in the repository names and descriptions, but does not search in the source code. We have to setup a third-party search engine.
- It allows us to have (apart from exceptional cases) a unique store where we can store all our source code, helping streamline many tools and processes.
- Our developers across teams use similar processes to develop and review their code; which makes movement of developers between teams easier.
- Bitbucket is one of the foundations that allowed us to implement our Devops strategy, especially thanks to its third-party tool integration (especially Jenkins)
Naturally, Bitbucket will be compared to GitHub, that has reached a tremendous importance in the open source software industry. Overall, Bitbucket comes with similar set of features as GitHub. Bitbucket brought a good integration with other Atlassian products (especially Confluence, JIRA, HipChat), and with a significantly lower price tag than GitHub.