Something that bugs me a lot, particularly when I’m working with other people in the same project are meaningless branch names. This leads to confusion and sometimes conflicting names. Thus, I would like to write about this gem I’ve been developing and maintaining for quite some time - StoryBranch .

Some Background

The development of this gem has started quite some time ago as an internal tool to integrate with the tracker we were using in my company - PivotalTracker. Some of the commands available still connect directly to that tracker, but I’ve put a significant amount of time refactoring the code, cleaning it up and make it more modular. At the moment it has integration with Github (which I use for tracking the issues for the Gem), PivotalTracker (which I currently don’t use but should still be fully functional) and recently initial integration with JIRA (which I currently use in my company).

Use case

As I’ve mentioned in the beginning of the article, I’m somewhat picky about branch names and how each one of them, while they live, they mean something. Even more, if I can directly from the branch name, pinpoint the issue that I’m trying to solve. With this gem, once configured with your project, just by running story_branch create it’ll look for issues in the configured tracker, list them for you to choose one from and create the branch from the issue name and id.

I reckon that there are different workflows for different companies and trackers and a lot of the refactoring I’ve been doing is with that in mind. My view for this project is that I’d provide a basic workflow integration with the different trackers but allow it to be extendable so each project could have its own.

Conclusion

I’m all in favor of tools that make me more efficient and clear with my work, and this is one of my go to tools. Give it a try and you’ll certainly see the benefits of it. Feel free to give feedback in the gem repo itself or suggestions on how to make it better for your use case.