There were several others active at around the same time, most with slightly different ideas on how to store the case data. One, for example, handled it with dot files committed as normal - no need to mess with refs.

One benefit of that method was that it was truly linked with the code, no need for additional push/pull commands or hooks. This also meant that you could tell the state of a case on a given branch without having to look through commit/merge history - it would become closed on master alongside the code merge.

That was also its downside though, since a case could have different comments/status on master vs branches where they started, you had to actually check each branch to see if someone else had already begun or not. Not having a grand centralized view was that one's downfall.