12 Days of Partners, Integrations, and Other Good Stuff: GitLab
It’s that time of year again. Snow has begun falling from the skies in places that are lucky enough to have moisture in the air, we’re all already tired of hearing Michael Buble songs playing on a loop, and some of us are getting in the spirit by wearing ugly Christmas sweaters everywhere we go.
To celebrate, Shortcut is highlighting twelve of our favorite integrations and partnerships. We hope you return every day to read these posts alongside your tinglers and fuzzles, your dafflers and wuzzles, and your delicious pot (or Beyond meat) roast.
Our sixth featured integration is GitLab, the platform that empowers us to work smarter, not harder, by merging projects seamlessly.
On the Sixth Day of Partnerships, Integrations, and Other Good Things, Shortcut brings to you: GitLab, the DevOps platform that empowers teams to collaboratively plan, build, secure, and deploy software with transparency, consistency, and traceability. These are all good things.
Do you realize that GitLab, shortened to its initials GL, corresponds accordingly to the initials of Geese (a)Laying, as in 6 of these GLs, in the song “The 12 Days of Christmas”? I mean, certainly you’ve thought of this.
Similar to our GitHub and BitBucket Cloud integrations, you can use the GitLab integration to reduce the number of status meetings, daily email follow-ups, and copy-pasting tasks from one tool to another.
Think of what you could do with this time you save. If you had fewer meetings, fewer emails, and fewer tasks, you’d have so much more time to iterate on the “The 12 Days of Christmas”, and help others get this song stuck in their heads for a long time. Or for at least 12 days. Feel free to sing it as you associate merge requests, branches, and commits from a GitLab Project to a Shortcut Story.
By doing these things, you’ll save time and facilitate easier collaboration. Time and ease - now that’s the holiday spirit.
So how does this integration work? Sync work in GitLab projects to the Shortcut Stories you are working on without leaving your command line in the following ways:
1. Stay in your workflow with specially formatted commit messages. Associate a commit to one or multiple Stories for insight into work in progress, right in your Stories.
2. Work more efficiently with branch naming conventions to automatically connect your branch to a Story and track the status of the request for that branch. When a branch is associated with a Story, you can open a merge request from Shortcut to make updates seamlessly.
You can also improve visibility with automation. As in: automatically sync the flow of information between GitLab and Shortcut with the integration so your organization can gain better insight into the status of work. You can do this in the following ways:
1. Associate a GitLab merge request with a Shortcut Story. You can do this when the request is opened and after the fact.
2. Automatically update the Story Workflow States while working in GitLab using event handlers.
Now you’re ready to give this Shortcut / GitLab integration a try.
To get started, have the admin or owner of your organization enable the integration and connect your GitLab account to your Shortcut Workspace. Detailed instructions about how to set up and use the integration can be found here.
Then you’ll be a pro, empowering your team, or gaggle of geese, to work together toward a common goal easier, with fewer steps.