Atlassian Bitbucket

What is Bitbucket?

Bitbucket is a repository for Git and Mercurial source code management. It provides storage combined with access control, and integration with the rest of the Atlassian suite, and is available in the cloud or as a locally hosted product. The locally hosted server version of Bitbucket, was until September 2015 known as Stash, however now, is referred to as Bitbucket Server.

As an Atlassian Solution Partner, we offer competitive Bitbucket pricing with standard commercial terms and consultancy on how it integrates with other products and plug-ins in the Atlassian suite (a typical development solution might consist of Bitbucket combined with Crucible and Fisheye). Both Bitbucket and Crucible will associate certain activities on the source code repository with Jira and as such have a very complementary relationship.

At Automation Consultants, we can also support your development processes with our multi-vendor, software lifecycle expertise.

Why is Bitbucket useful?

Typically a developer, or team of developers, would work with local access to Git or Mercurial source code control tools when developing and testing software. Using source code repository applications such as these is now an integral part of the development process. Over and above the basic features of Git or Mercurial source code control, Bitbucket provides user access control and integration with Jira Software and other Atlassian products. This makes it very useful when it comes to the management of teams and projects.

User privileges are one of Bitbucket’s greatest assets and help teams collaborate effectively. By assigning privileges, and enabling collaboration in the form of discussions, line-by-line, within the source code itself, Bitbucket can be the key to successful adoption of agile methods such as Scrum. In fact adopting Scrum without Bitbucket is arguably unthinkable. The integration of Bitbucket with Jira Software allows for tasks to be associated with sections of code, and for the tasks to be uploaded and updated automatically as code is pushed. Product owners, managers and Scrum masters can be granted custom privileges within Bitbucket ensuring that requirements are systematically and properly managed.

Competing products, such as Git Hub, provide similar cloud based services where code can be stored. Bitbucket Cloud however, has superior performance to products such as this for a couple of reasons: Firstly, Bitbucket has a better, and tighter integration with Jira and other tools in the Atlassian suite. Secondly, compared to competitors, Bitbucket pricing is generally cheaper when purchased for commercial use.

In a nutshell, Bitbucket:

Provides access control to Git repositories.
Increases collaboration by interfacing with integrated Jira Software agile project management.
Integrates with Jira Software and other Atlassian products such as Bamboo (if you’re using Jira Agile for example, then you may already be automatically uploading to Bitbucket – Bitbucket asks what task is associated with a commit – before the issue is automatically updated to reflect the task – this means it’s easy to link development of code to project management).
Provides a cheaper alternative than competitors when it comes to commercial use.

Bitbucket is available in the cloud or as a locally installed application. For your own hosted version of Bitbucket please see Atlassian’s Bitbucket Server (formerly Stash).