The Benefits of a Merged Project Management and Version Control Environment
Allison Bokone
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Last updated on August 5, 2024
There are many version control options to choose from and even more project management tools. One important aspect to consider when choosing software for your team is if these two types of tools can be used together through supported integrations. While your engineering team could choose a version control system independent from your project management team’s choice of tooling, there are several advantages to integrating your project management environment with version control.
When your engineering and project management teams operate in separate tools that lack integration, there are 3 major drawbacks:
Project management and software engineering are distinct disciplines and are often overseen by different groups of people. However, they typically report up to the same management chain and there is overlap in what project management and engineering teams need to track.
Both teams must carefully track the project schedule, dependencies, progress, issues, and overall status. They may be tracking different levels of detail but there is still a significant duplication of effort if each team has to track project-related details independently – not just in the data, but in the time and labor put into updating that effort across both teams.
While some statuses – such as open issues, dependencies, and feature progress – may be automatically updated in a version control system that includes bug reporting and tasks tied to check-ins, if the project management tools are separate, that information will have to be manually updated for both teams to have accurate information.
Those manual updates lead to the second major challenge of a non-integrated environment: the lack of real-time updates. Any time manual steps are introduced into a process, it slows down, becomes less reliable, and is more prone to human error. The time spent keeping project data and status up to date in both systems can become a burden for both teams.
If project management tools are not integrated with version control, your teams will have to be extra diligent about communicating regularly, ensuring data is updated across both systems and quickly alerting the other team if something changes to make up for the lack of real-time updates. For even the most collaborative teams this can quickly become overwhelming and lead to communication breakdowns, which might include a lack of proper status updates across both tools. It also hinders each team’s ability to work independently because much of the communication must be done outside of the tools.
Many of these challenges can be eliminated or improved by choosing a software program that integrates project management and engineering functions such as version control. Having an integrated tool allows your team to leverage:
With integrated project management and version control your teams can easily hand off work between project management and engineering. Working in one tool allows project managers to create user scenarios to configure the overall project timeline that engineering teams can further break down into tasks assigned to sprints. As code is checked in, tasks are updated, and everyone sees the updates. If dates change, you won’t need to copy the changes into multiple tools and will quickly see how those date changes impact your planning and engineering timelines.
This tighter integration not only simplifies planning and status tracking but also enhances collaboration through streamlined communication and more transparency. When the project management and engineering teams work in the same tool they have visibility into the end-to-end view of the project. Commit messages are associated with the tasks and the status updates are visible to the project manager who is building reports and monitoring the timeline. Tasks can be assigned back and forth between different teams and everyone knows who to reach out to if they have a question about a task because it’s available in the shared environment.
Linking commits from version control directly to tasks allows for strong traceability for every change made to your codebase. Linking those tasks to user stories further improves traceability and gives teams an organized view of how their work fits together. Dependency linking ensures that everyone on the team understands the order in which certain tasks must be implemented. This also makes it easier to spot potential problem areas earlier and work across teams to resolve them early.
Simplified workflow, enhanced collaboration, and better traceability lead to improved efficiency. Having a single source of truth means all your teams will have an accurate view of project progress and a clear understanding of how their work fits together and contributes to the success of your company. In addition, using a tool that integrates project management and version control saves the time and effort of setting up and maintaining more than one software program.
Assembla supports Agile and Scrum methodologies and includes project management features such as sprint planning, backlog management, and progress tracking, in addition to seamless integration with Git, SVN, and Perforce. Both project management and engineering teams will benefit from Assembla’s robust reporting and dashboard capabilities, which can be customized and automated to keep teams aligned, agile, and productive. The clear visualizations and status updates will keep all stakeholders informed of the high-level project status and the ability to link commits to tasks ensures traceability and visibility between engineering and project management teams at a granular level.
