Source Control Management systems are the bread and butter of any software development team. Git, the prevailing solution for managing your source code, has various implementations.
With the 2025.2 release, Agile Tools supports three of them: GitLab, HitHub, and Bitbucket.
What are the business benefits of having a Git integration?
Integrating Agile Tools with GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket to track commit information provides specific benefits to developer productivity, directly impacting business results.
Improved task context
When a developer, product manager, or QA team member looks at a task, they can immediately see all the code changes associated with the task without having to search through git logs. This provides valuable context that speeds up their work.
Returning to a task
Developers can quickly refresh their memory by reviewing the linked Git commits. A developer (re)takes a task they worked on weeks ago. Instead of spending time re-familiarizing themselves with the code, they can instantly see the relevant Git history within the task. This includes:
The specific code changes made.
The reasoning behind those changes (commit messages).
Any related discussions from pull requests.
This reduces context-switching and allows them to pick up where they left off, saving time and reducing errors.
Working on someone else's code
Developers gain immediate context and understanding of the code's history and purpose. A developer pulls a task to fix a bug in code written by a colleague. By viewing the linked Git commits, they can:
See who made the changes and when.
Understand the intent behind the changes.
Identify potential side effects of their modifications.
This helps them understand the code faster, reduces the risk of introducing new bugs, and fosters better collaboration. Also, by seeing the linked task, they can understand the business reason the code was created in the first place.
Adding an integration
Navigate to Settings ≫ Integrations ≫ Source Code Management.
There, you will find two tabs: Integrations and Repositories.
Integrations
The Integrations tab is where you add the integration to your git provider.
Clicking on the Create Integration button opens a short wizard that will help you quickly set up an integration.
There are three options in the next step. In this first release, one type of integration is available: webhooks.
With webhooks, there is only one more thing to do here in Agile Tools - press the “ADD INTEGRATION” button!
With that, the third step opens up…
Agile Tools generated:
a webhook URL, and
a secret key.
Now, you provide these two pieces of data to your git cloud provider. Here are the links for the documentation pages for GitLab, GitHub, and Bitbucket on how to do that.
Agile Tools will process any push event you configure in your git provider.
Secret key
For security reasons, the secret key generated by Agile Tools for any webhook integration is valid for six months by default. You can easily renew the secret, which will grant access to Agile Tools processing for another six months.
Agile Tools admins will be notified by email when webhooks are overdue. You will also see that Agile Tools is rejecting any webhook processing in your provider’s webhook configuration page, as the provider stops sending configured events if they are rejected several times in a row.
Repositories
Source code repositories are listed in the second tab. Those are all the repositories that are collected by processing webhook events. This list depends entirely on how you configure webhooks in your git provider. If you configure, say, GitLab to send push events on a group or subgroup containing several repositories, then those that triggered the event will also be listed in Agile Tools at the repositories tab.
Observing commits for git push events
If you put any of the existing Value Unit’s key in the commit message, you will be able to see the list of commits that are part of a particular push event on the Value Item detail page.
For example, your commit message might be “feat: AT-973 The feature X implemented”, or “Fixed BB-73 Memory leak”.
If you have a Value Unit (project, product, service, …) with suck keys (AT, BB), and a Value Item with such a key exists, then you will see the commits in a new tab, “Code”.
Clicking on the commit reference will take you to a page on your git cloud provider where all the changes are detailed for every file and line.
The commits will be grouped by repository and sorted by date. If, for some reason, you are working on the same Value Item in repositories from different providers, the events will all be listed in this Code tab.
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