Which mix of products do I need for my workflow (see text)?

[Borek Bernard]

We have a JIRA installation and host our Git repository on BitBucket. We want to be able to add comments to our commits and I'm not sure which mix of products should we get and how they would work together. A few observations / questions:

• JIRA has a plugin for BitBucket. That will probably link to BitBucket commits from JIRA issues if commits are tagged properly, does it do anything else?
• Comments can be added directly on BitBucket. Will these comments be visible in JIRA using the BitBucket plugin?
• FishEye seems to duplicate (and sometimes improve) a lot of functionality of BitBucket, do we need FishEye?
• Crucible seems to the main thing for code comments and code reviews. Does it integrate well with BitBucket or would we need to get FishEye?

Thanks for clearing things up for me.

[Sten Pittet · Accepted solution]

Hi Borek,

Could you elaborate on your use case? When / Why do you want to add comments to your commit?

If it's a review process then Crucible should be the solution you're looking for. It can integrate with any Git repository as long as it can have access to it.

Getting FishEye on top of Crucible will allow you to have a better experience when browsing the code or exploring your history as FishEye will provide that capability (as opposed to forcing you to log on Bitbucket to look at your source and history).

Crucible alone will still allow you to create reviews for your commits, giving you the possibility to write inline comments and mark defect. On top of that you'll get a JIRA integration allowing you to create subtasks in JIRA from your Crucible comments.

[Borek Bernard]

Correct, it is mostly for a quick code review purposes.

We are just a small team of distributed developers and when someone makes a commit, I sometimes need to comment on that. Of course I can send the developer an IM message or Skype him but I'd rather store the comment together with the source code. The first apparent option is to add a comment directly on BitBucket, however, I'm not sure how flexible those comments are (are they file-level only? can they be integrated into JIRA usuing the connector?).

So Crucible sounds like a tool we need and I think the rest of your post explain quite nicely what we will miss if we go with plain Crucible without FishEye. I'd gladly use FishEye + Crucible combo but I need to be concerned about price - Crucible and FishEye seem to become pricey sooner than JIRA (lower user limits) and cost is definitely a concern for us. I'll probably need to evaluate whether FishEye is worth the extra cost.

But from the technical perspective thanks for the explanation.

[Borek Bernard]

BTW, if I install FishEye and Crucible together and later decide that I don't need FishEye, can it be uninstalled while maintaining Crucible? Edit: this page answers my question.

[Sten Pittet]

I'd suggest to try both Bitbucket and FishEye and see which ones suits your needs better. Crucible is dedicated to code reviews and all the features that it integrates are made to facilitate commenting on commits and maintaining code quality, especially if you're a distributed team.

Bitbucket is more lightweight on this side of the story, but it might be just right for you. To be honest I'd recommend Crucible, not because I'm the product manager :) but because if you're looking for reviews, then this is what Crucible does. And it's not bad at doing it.

[Borek Bernard]

I've been trying to evaluate Crucible for the last couple of days but I must say that, unfortunately, I haven't seen such user unfriendly and buggy software for a long time. If you're interested in an off-list feedback please let me know where I can send it. But I'm not even sure I'll be able to name all the issues I have had with Crucible. I didn't expect it to be such a bad experience...

[Sten Pittet]

If you're interested in an off-list feedback please let me know where I can send it

Could you send me an email at spittet at atlassian dot com? Feedback about our products is always welcome.

[Colin Goudie]

• AFAIK - Pretty much just allows commits to appear against the correct JIRA issue in JIRA
• Comments in bitbucket are only for pull requests aren't they? Unlike github it doesn't have inline commenting? So no
• It duplicates for sure, not sure about improve, but does add some more features like smart checkin comments which can resolve issues, start crucible reviews etc.
• Crucible is only for Fisheye. If you want crucible in your workflow you'll need to use fisheye. You could still just use bitbucket for hosting source etc..

[Borek Bernard]

2) BitBucket supports commit comments (though not on file/line level as GitHub I believe).

4) From this page: http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/CRUCIBLE/Installing+Crucible: "FishEye is not required by Crucible, but FishEye features will not be available (browsing source, file history, comprehensive search etc)." Which confuses me a bit - how is code review useful without browsing a source code?