GitLab at a small company

Item: GitLab
Rating: 9
Author: Balázs Kiss

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it for nearly all of our projects, as one of the central repository and DevOps tools. We use most of its features, mostly the repository, ticketing, and CI/CD pipelines. It has been our main project management tool for many years now.

Pros and Cons

Very nice and high UX value GUI.
Pipeline administration.
Issue tracking and wiki functionality.

Must restart it when we upgrade it, upgrade processes tend to be problematic.

Return on Investment

We can use GitLab instead of multiple different tools.
We changed our deployments scripts to GitLab pipelines which provided to be more maintainable.
Issue-tracking is much faster with its simple UI.

Alternatives Considered

Jenkins, GitHub, Redmine and Atlassian Confluence

GitLab is the best combination of all the other tools. They are still viable in their own sense, but for the projects we were using, GitLab proved to be an excellent alternative.

Support Rating

Key Insights

Do you think GitLab delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with GitLab's feature set?

Yes

Did GitLab live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of GitLab go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy GitLab again?

Yes

Other Software Used

IntelliJ IDEA, Chrome DevTools

Likelihood to Recommend

For modern software projects, this tool is one of the best solutions for essential must-haves. It provides basic issue-tracking, ticketing, repository, and pipeline functions. From small to highly complex software, from single player projects to multi-level software building, this tool has nearly everything you need. Easy to configure and use, has a lot of best-practices already built in, easy to use, and shortens unnecessary devops scripting to a minimum as well as providing a very useful central repository for your code just as git. It expands git functionality greatly.

Code Management

It made collaboration incredibly easier! Gitlab serves as the central nerve for nearly all of our projects, where we store code, documentation, configuration for every project of the entire company. Accessing and working on code and documents at the same time, from the office or from home, Gitlab is one of the best collaboration tools, and it's main power is in collecting all the different features of a softwer writing process to the same place.

Workload Coordination

Gitlab itself has some support on applying best practices, but it only serves as a base for that. It's gitlab ci system allows us to create jobs and workflows, which is quite easy to learn and easy to maintain. It serves as an excellent foundation for the said techniques, but it's not a guarantee.

Tool Consolidation

Yep, it has replaced nearly all of our tools.
- Our documentation has moved from JIRA to Gitlab Wiki
- Our CI and release manager is now Gitlab instead of Jenkins
- We changed our custom VM system to Gitlab workers
- Our kanban boards and ticketing systems are now all merged into Gitlab as well.