I'm a product manager on the Bitbucket team.

For the first issue you mention, it sounds like you might be using an older version as this has been improved in a couple of respects in the last few releases. Specifically, the create pull request menu item (and it's siblings) are no longer collapsed in the sidebar. There is also a create pull request button on the pull request list page, and recently updated branches have a create pull request button on the personal dashboard shipped in Bitbucket Server 4.10.

Regarding frequent repos, I'm not entirely clear on where you're encountering this issue. If you send a screenshot to rbarnes atlassian com (spaces -> at, dot) I'll be happy to follow up with the team. We have some repo findability improvements in the works so it's a good time to make sure we haven't missed a pain point.

On the markup front, I hear ya. History makes it a little tricky to resolve in a way that will satisfy all, but we're looking at where editor UIs can converge to.

Normally, I create a pull request using the server response from git on the command line - Bitbucket replies with a URL to create a PR. In fact I have a git alias, 'git gone', which pushes, parses the response looking for the URL and launches it in my browser.

Per-developer repos are definitely an anti-pattern for Bitbucket usage. They just don't work well; it's all too easy to have a half-dozen slightly different versions of a branch in different people's repositories. It's generally better to use your local repo for your personal branches, and use a single repo on Bitbucket for team interaction. There's definitely a risk of data loss if it's not otherwise backed up, of course.

My personal bugbears are mostly relating to Jira. It needs a better mechanism for integrating estimated & actual numbers for predicting velocity. The only mechanism it natively supports is story points, and it's not enough. You often want to break down stories, but the hierarchy really doesn't work well. You can't put numbers on a finer granularity than stories.

It also doesn't work at a higher level, when developing a road map. It's just kind of stuck in the middle.

Could you share your git gone alias? It sounds handy :)

I would be interested to know as well. To add to your list. If you need to scale up to huge intsances it hurts. Repo Clones take huge amount of resources for some reason, and updates require hours of downtime to spin the cluster up again. Aparrently there development team haven't even had a very large instance for test until late 2016 so fixing there issues is likely to take time.

Bitbucket product manager here.

Sorry to hear you've been having trouble. What you describe is most definitely unusual so I'd suggest contacting us (or having your admin contact us) at support.atlassian.com so we can look into it.

The team has spent a great deal of effort over the entire life of the product to ensure it performs at scale for broad range of load profiles. The notion that we only recently had a very large instance for test is untrue. Perhaps someone got the wrong idea from our most recent series on how we build Bitbucket Data Center to _already_ support massive scale: https://developer.atlassian.com/blog/2016/12/how-we-built-bi...

sounds exactly like jira and bamboo

an empty jira instance on hardware meeting their recommended spec used to take 3+ minutes to start up

Jira is in many ways the "hub" of the Atlassian eco system and I'm hard pressed to find an alternative that will integrate with so many other products. If it's just Bitbucket you dislike, then you could just sign up for Github. The rest of the Atlassian suite isn't that tied to Bitbucket.

I worked for a company that used Confluence and Jira with Github and I now work for a company that have a self hosted Bitbucket, the integrations are equally good (in my opinion).

It isn't until you try to replace Jira you'll run into problems.

For the source code management, you can try rhodecode. There's a community version too.