In the fight over the hearts and minds of developers, code hosting providers must release new features on a regular basis if they want to keep up with the competition.

GitLab Inc. upped the ante today by rolling out a major update to its namesake repository management platform that aims to streamline software projects. The arguably biggest change is in the tool’s team administration feature, which can now be used to create sub-groups for the individual units that make up an engineering division. It aims to accomplish the same goal as the Enterprise Grid platform that Slack Technologies Inc. released two months ago.

Grouping a department by teams can help reduce the clutter in a developer’s feed while making it easier for managers to communicate updates. Companies may use GitLab 9.0 to assign users to groups based on the projects that they’re working, corporate hierarchy or any other organizational requirement that might arise. 

The improved team management feature is joined by a couple of monitoring tools designed to provide better insight into the status of projects. The first is called Deploy Board and tracks the progress of each update as it’s rolled out to production. According to GitLab, the console provides the ability to reverse a change when something breaks with a single click, which can potentially save up a lot of time in large companies that release new code multiple times a day.

The other new addition allows teams to keep tabs on the performance of their production applications. Prometheus, as GitHub calls the tool, aims to eliminate the need for the organizations to deploy a separate monitoring system.

The startup can be expected to continue adding such value-added features over time as it works to win over customers from GitHub Inc., its top rival in the repository management segment. GitLab already boasts an installed base of more than 100,000 organizations, including NASA, Verizon Communications Inc. and the NASDAQ Stock Market.

Image: GitLab