Using git effectively

Like most of the developer blogosphere, I was thoroughly excited to read Vincent Driessen's post on branch management in git. It captured a simple and repeatable methodology for extracting a great deal of power from git without having to really dive down into its belly. Given that Vincent's methodology relies heavily on feature and bugfix branches, I began looking for techniques on combining Pivotal Tracker — which I've been using recently for all of my project management needs — with git. I found some advice in Rein Henrichs' article which suggests using Pivotal Tracker story ids as branch identifiers, but not much else on how to really tighten the two together.

Moving towards smoother integration

Further Googling didn't reveal any tools to aide my new objective, so I set out to create my own toolkit. After a few evenings digging through Pivotal Tracker's API (which actually changed from v2 to v3 while I worked :P), I'm ready to announce my work: Git Pivotal. It's a very alpha release currently, but I have some work in development that will (hopefully) stabilize it soon.

Git Pick

The first (and currently only) tool is git pick. After some simple configuration, this will grab your top-most available feature story from Pivotal Tracker, display some simple info about it and offer to create a feature branch for it off of your current branch.

What's coming

I plan to add some additional commands for marking current feature branches as finished, managing bugs and bugfix branches and possibly integrating release stories as well. If you're a fan of git and Pivotal Tracker, keep an eye on this project!

So what do you think? Is this useful? Share your thoughts below!