Background

Git was the version control system of choice at a previous company who made use of the following online services:

• Jira for issue tracking.
• Bitbucket as the online repository and code review platform.
• Team City for automated tests and code deployment.

Hol' up, aren't these services integrated already? What are these extensions for?

Good question!

Firstly, you must understand that the codebase was setup as follows:

• Hundreds of independent 'apps' were contained in separated Git repos.
• Features often required changes in multiple apps as apps were highly integrated.
• Deploying a single feature could therefore require one to review, track, and deploy code over multiple repos.

They already handle multiple repos don't they?

Yes, but...

They were often lacking given our specific setup:

• Jira linked to pull requests but with limited information. 'Which apps have this feature?', 'Has this code been deployed?'. We couldn't easily tell.
• Services required manual integration. For example if a Team City build failed, we had to manually find the Jira issue or Bitbucket pull request.
• Finding code, fetching it locally, then building it all took time. More apps meant more work.

The Git tools fixed these types of issues and simplified the lives of developers in this multi-repo world.