There seems to be a big disconnect between project management, bug/issue tracking and source control solutions out there. Simply put in most companies these systems don’t talk to each other as much as they should.

How have I solved the problem. I’m using bitbucket.org for source control that talks nicely with LighthouseApp which I use mainly for bug-tracking (Milestones feature is nice… but only for bigger teams).

We don’t really use anything for project management per se, although we do use Highrise as our CRM system and it has a cool, “Cases” feature. So lets say we’re doing a site redesign I  create a new case and upload all relevant assets  / discussions to that case. Highrise comes with awesome email integration, so each case gets a unique email address and I can fwd emails to it, and they get attached to the case automagically. I think BaseCamp is for dedicated project management, but for now I can live with leveraging Highrise features.

So I started a new gig this week, and I have become addicted to using Mercurial in my previous job for revision control of code. Mercurial rocks !

I didn’t really want to host the repository myself and have the additional headache of backing it up etc. (we’re a small early stage startup). I used Assembla before, and its very mediocre, tries to offer everything and is using .htaccess based authentication, making me type my username and password multiple times, doesn’t support the native mercurial web view, offers trac for ticketing which sucks… etc. etc.

Then I came across BitBucket. These guys rock! Firstly its an inexpensive service to host your mercurial repositories; I will end up paying $5/month for hosting my dev/prod (upto 5) repositories with them. They offer issue tracking too (for which I am using LightHouse app). The mercurial integration is pretty deep, offers hooks which can send you emails, twitter, link to your bug tracking system etc. And its hosted so I don’t have to worry about backing it up, uptime, security/auth etc.

A shout out to BitBucket’s customer service. I am not even a paying customer yet (using the free version for now, till I need a “prod” repository) and they have been trying to resolve my complaints. For example I filed this enhancement request with them, asking them to writer me a broker to close/update my issues in Lighthouse app when I merge bugs etc. Turnaround time? < 1 day ! Their developer Jesper Noehr went out of his way, fixed a few bugs he inadvertently put into the broker code, launched the fixes and the feature overnight, and voila I have this feature out of the box.

Wish every company (hoping mine will be in this category too, when we launch!) had such good customer satisfaction! Thanks BitBucket and thanks Jesper!