Introducing: Bitbucket Cards

Today I’m excited to announce Bitbucket Cards (www.bitbucketcards.com). This project management tool lets you visualize and manage your Bitbucket issues on one easy-to-use, intuitive dashboard.

How does it work?

When you first log in to Bitbucket Cards, the Dashboard view will display the projects you’re following on Bitbucket. From this view, you can click through to a card-wall view of the issue tracker of each project.

The top navigation bar persists across the app’s two screens and provides you easy access to your projects, the repositories you are following, and team members you wish to invite.

Once you’re on the project page, you can drag and drop issues between columns to transition them, or drag and drop them between versions to manage your iterations.You can even drag and drop entire columns to rearrange your workflow.

A background task runs periodically to check if an issue has been updated. Bitbucket Cards will prompt you to refresh the card wall if someone else has updated an issue either through Bitbucket Cards or through the issue tracker in Bitbucket.

Columns and their rules are totally customisable. Add/remove columns at will, and set column rules to organise issues by:

  • kind (bug, task, enhancement or proposal)
  • the person responsible for each issue
  • status (new, open, on hold, …)
  • priority (blocker, critical, major, minor, trivial)

Bitbucket Cards will default with four columns based on issue status: New, On Hold, In Progress, and Resolved. Nonetheless, you can customize Bitbucket Cards to whichever way fits your development workflow. For example, you might have a column for each member of your team, so you can see how the team’s work is distributed and easily shift cards between your team members.

Did you know?

Bitbucket’s REST API allows for some pretty awesome control over a Bitbucket repository’s issues, and Bitbucket’s OAuth support means users don’t need to register an account with Bitbucket Cards on top of their Bitbucket account — a huge win. The only additional content created and stored by Bitbucket Cards is your column configuration, which is almost entirely driven through the data associated with issues on Bitbucket. Bitbucket’s REST API made building this app a breeze.

The app is written in Python using the Flask micro framework, but is predominantly client-side javascript. jQuery UI was used for all the drag and drop functionality, and Twitter Bootstrap was used for various UI components.

I want to get started!

Click the button below to try Bitbucket Cards out today.

Note: BitbucketCards is a Bitbucket Labs project that I worked on during my 20% time. It is not yet fully supported by Atlassian or Bitbucket. Please be sure to raise any issues on my card wall and I’ll do my best to get to them quickly.