Show me an alternative that is (a) able to be hosted and (b) isn't designed for startups.
There are lots of agile tools but most of them deliberately ignore the enterprise space.
There are lots of agile tools but most of them deliberately ignore the enterprise space.
The bug/issue tracker we're currently using is not terrible, but it's a little painful. However, we've just barely gotten people trained to use the current system. I can either accept the current, somewhat clunky system, or go through another year of retraining and hope the slicker tool and the additional features are a net win.
At least JetBrains actively works on their products. Our current tool hasn't changed in three years, and that was just a reskin of the UI to a more bootstrappy css.
Huge downsides:
- Doing centralized authentication in a large-organization environment is basically impossible. Its LDAP implementation is broken for anything else than a couple very standard schemas that they've tested against & you can't make it authenticate using a Windows domain. They've recently split out the user management, etc., components into a separate product called Hub, but it's the same code and suffers from the same problems. [NB: Hilariously enough, other JetBrains products work just fine in this regard.]
- The thing uses some custom proprietary database. Integrating backups into your normal workflow is painful. Upgrades are VERY painful (oops, the old version had a database that didn't enforce some constraints that the new one does, please go fix all your issues by hand), although there's some auxiliary API and tools for exporting individual issues as -- if I recall correctly -- JSON objects that was an 80% solution.
Upsides:
- The UI does the expected thing by default in all cases we could find. It is also fast & responsive, relatively uncluttered, and doesn't have a bunch of extra things to click in order to create/comment on/edit issues.
- Searching for issues is very fast and powerful.
- Batch updating issues (which we tend to do a lot) is extremely easy. Make a custom search describing the issues to update, then update all of them with a couple clicks.
The admin downsides were (for us at least) bad enough that I'm not sure I'd recommend deploying it if you already have a working, integrated system. If you're starting from scratch, though, or committed to replacing another system for whatever reason, it's a pretty good choice.
Upsource also looks very interesting, is that also something you have used? We don't really have a good tool for doing code review at the moment. Also, the VCS browsing capabilities look to be miles ahead of what our current setup offers (almost completely unusable, hijacks the browser back button, no searching, definitely no chance of static analysis, links sent out in email notifications constantly pointed at the wrong thing, etc.).
Currently we're looking very hard at Critic (https://critic-review.org/ is a demo site, code's on github) because it looks to offer the closest workflow to what we use.
We're specifically looking for something sorta similar to Gerrit as far as how reviews work, but while actually supporting a feature-branch-heavy workflow where we tend to review branches rather than individual commits, and frequently rebuild/rebase feature branches.
Obviously, if your workflow is different then your needs for a review tool may differ wildly.
Other than that, I took a quick look at your product and it's feature-wise close to something I would want to use. Only comments I would make would be that non GitHub projects generally want the review tool to handle the branch management (a.k.a storing pull requests, flagging their status, etc.): of course only focusing on GitHub lets you not worry about that and get a product running much sooner... You should spend some serious time looking at your page load times as well - I'm 10msec away from your server and the demo code review at https://reviewable.io/reviews/Reviewable/demo/1 took nearly three full seconds to load, even with most static assets already cached since I didn't timeline it on the first attempt.
Developing against the GitHub API does carry some non-trivial advantages: among other things, I never actually clone any repos. This wouldn't be possible with a raw git repo. I'm considering adapting the tool to AWS CodeCommit, though, which might be a decent middle ground. Making my own equivalent of pull requests is actually the least of the changes I'd need to make, though.
And yeah, performance is a never-ending battle... But considering that all the work is done in the browser (fetching sources, diffing, formatting, etc.) I think it's actually not too bad. Again, like running in the cloud, it's a trade-off of in favor of flexibility and development speed.
The gotcha? Runs on Windows Server which probably doesn't compute for startups but works well for typical enterprise shops that have stacks of Windows Server.
Self-hosting is still a huge market but one that is more and more under-served.
Disclaimer: MS engineer, these are my own statements etc etc.