Five exciting new features coming to Bitbucket Cloud

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As part of our product strategy to build for scale, security, and compliance, Bitbucket Cloud is continuing to invest in features that help enterprise teams operate at scale and build world-class software. In this blog, we’ll share some of our recently shipped features and five exciting features we have lined up for you.

If you're a Bitbucket Server customer looking to migrate before the end of support (Feb 15, 2024), we have some migration resources listed at the bottom of the blog. With Bitbucket Cloud, you get a trusted, secure platform, deep integrations to Atlassian tools, and market-leading DevOps apps to help you connect your workflow from planning to operations.

Recently shipped:

• Scale CI/CD workflows: Import Bitbucket Pipelines yml files across repos so all developers on a team can use the same consistent workflow, performing all the same workflow steps and tests across the project. Learn more

• Find unresolved comments faster: When you have multiple files to review and many comments, it can be hard to find the comments that still need attention. We’ve added a new dropdown in the pull request page that lets you jump to unresolved comments or find specific resolved ones. Learn more

• Support Linux ARM self-hosted runners: If you have builds that require ARM runners, you can now point your cloud builds using Bitbucket Pipelines to your runners behind the firewall. Learn more

• Project-level merge checks: If you have a complex project with many repos, you can now apply a standard set of checks to all repositories within a project, making it easier to manage and maintain a consistent workflow. Learn more

What we’re building now

Here are 5 exciting features that we’re launching in the next few months.

Customize Bitbucket Cloud with Forge

Forge is Atlassian’s serverless app development platform, designed to enable customers and marketplace vendors to build secure, reliable, and scalable apps for our cloud tools. It’s hosted on the Atlassian platform, with intuitive UI, and has API authentication built-in. Currently, Forge has been available to build apps for Jira, Confluence, and Jira Service Management users and it’s now coming to Bitbucket Cloud. With Forge being integrated into Bitbucket, you can build custom apps and integrate them into your Bitbucket Cloud instance. Review Forge docs.

 

Custom merge checks

We are building functionality to enable you to add custom merge checks into your instance using Forge.

While our current merge checks feature allows you to select from a predefined list of code quality checks before merging code, we know that each organization has its own set of processes and compliance requirements that need to be followed when merging code. With custom merge checks, you’ll be able to define custom criteria that must pass in order for a pull request to be merged to production.

You’ll be able to build your custom rules in Forge and integrate it into your instance. For example, custom rules could be something like:

• no merges after 5pm on a Friday or when there are no on-call engineers scheduled

• PR’s must include approvals from specific members of the team, based on the files modified

• Check if all feature flags in the code have been created in your feature flag tool e.g. Launch Darkly.

These custom checks will appear in your merge checks UI in Bitbucket Cloud and users can toggle on/off or configure as needed based on the project.

Generative AI in text editors

In April, we announced Atlassian Intelligence to bring the power of AI into our tools. We are starting by adding AI features in text editors across all our products. In Bitbucket Cloud, you'll see AI functionality in the comment editor and PR description editor. You'll be able to use AI to summarize your comments or change the tone of comments before you publish. We are currently in EAP and plan to roll out soon.

Code review with AI

Next, we are working to launch AI functionality to help speed up code reviews. When you submit code for review, AI will analyze the code and leave comments with suggested changes. Reviewers can decide whether to accept the change or not. This means reviewers can spend more time on code where manual review is needed. Follow our roadmap to stay updated on the launch timeline. This is currently in design.

Unified User Management

We’ve heard from many customers that you want to manage Bitbucket users the same way you do with Jira and Confluence. With Unified User Management, we’re bringing Bitbucket user, group, and permission management to Atlassian Admin. This means that you can manage users across your Atlassian tools in one unified place and connect to third-party identity providers like Okta, Azure AD, and others via Atlassian Access. This has been one of the top requests from our enterprise admins. New Bitbucket customers will be eligible in early 2024 and existing customers will get the feature in late 2024. Learn more

Follow our public roadmap to follow along for timing on these projects.

Migration resources

If you’re a Server or Data Center customer considering migrating to Bitbucket Cloud, here are some resources to get started or continue the process via our support resources.

• Watch this demo on how Bitbucket Cloud and Jira Software Cloud work together.

• On-demand Migration Webinar: Listen to Bitbucket's Head of Product, Chris Clarke, review the product vision and roadmap & get tips on migrating.

• Bitbucket Cloud Migration Assistant: Use our free app to migrate to Cloud.

• If you have migration questions, select 'migration support' from the dropdown and submit here.

[xicond]

waiting for first best impression on AI code review

[Aron Gombas]

I have a few questions.

Customize Bitbucket Cloud with Forge

Right now, you can't build a paid app for Bitbucket Cloud unless I am mistaken. This is a blocker for vendors of commercial apps. Is there a plan and target date to remove this blocker?

Custom merge checks

Is there a target date for this? Is this feature strictly about checking pull requests, or can this check "pushes" as well?

[Ulrich Kuhnhardt _IzymesCo_]

+1 on the remote pre-commit check hook. 

[Edmund Munday]

Hi @Aron Gombas

Thanks for the questions, the initial release of Custom Merge Checks will primarily be targeted at customers wanting to use Forge to write their own custom logic into their PR process using Forge.

We are planning to bring Bitbucket Cloud Forge apps to the Atlassian Marketplace, and are working through a list of dependencies in terms of integrating with the relevant Economy Platform components to make that possible.

Unfortunately I can't give you a date right now, but if you're a marketplace vendor and want to bring apps to Bitbucket Cloud, please shoot me an email at emunday@atlassian.com as I'd love to chat.

In terms of pre-receive/push checks. This is not something we're going to be looking at for at least 12 months unfortunately. The reason being that in a multi-tenanted cloud Git solution it's SIGNIFICANTLY more complicated to provide something equivalent to pre-receive checks than it is in an on-prem environment (you'll notice all the major cloud SCM providers face this same limitation). We did quite a bit of research into the difference between pre-receive and pre-merge in terms of value vs effort to support and based on that research we've prioritised pre-merge first.

That's not to say that pre-receive will never happen, it's just not the best "bang for buck" we could provide at this stage.

[Aron Gombas _Midori_]

@Edmund Munday Yes, I am developer. We are building the Better Commit Policy family of apps used by large transportation companies, banks, insurance and defense companies, healthcare and other safety-critical industries.

If Atlassian is willing to bring these customers to the Cloud (won't be easy), then associating Git commits with Jira issues in a controlled/enforced way and traceability of changes back to Jira issue will be key.

We will contact you in email!

[JoeyBerger]

Cool - when can we get dark mode?

[John Dunlap]

Could you revert all of these features and implement this instead?
https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/BCLOUD-14286

[Dave Parrish _Atlassian_]

Love the fire @John Dunlap and @JoeyBerger! Both Dark Mode and Cascading Merge are on our radar, but haven't risen to the top of our backlog for the Code side of Bitbucket. In addition to the features @Ash Moosa mentioned above, here are some of the other things we're working on now (or in the immediate future):

• Batched comments (BCLOUD-14900, BCLOUD-20188, BCLOUD-21268, BCLOUD-14862)
• Iterative reviews (BCLOUD-14889, BCLOUD-19687)
• Marking files as viewed (BCLOUD-19679)

We'll post an update on the other feature requests that you mention when we have a clearer sense of priority + timing. Not the answer you wanted, but hopefully it's helpful to get a more detailed picture of what we're working on.

[John Dunlap]

If you respected the votes on the issues we wouldn't have to wonder.

[adamsn82]

When will a decision be made on this bug that was intentially introduced last year? 

[BCLOUD-21964] Preview-merge diff type on demand

[Jordan Brown]

+1 on [BCLOUD-21964] Preview-merge diff type on demand ? Create some sort of option please at least. I even suggested a potential filter/workaround that bitbucket should be able to implement in a straightforward way (at least outside looking in haha): https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/BCLOUD-21964?focusedId=3337896&page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel#comment-3337896 (search the section in that comment "@Bitbucket, here's potentially an interim solution for you:").

[Daniel Pasch-Sannapiu]

Your pull request code review experience is a disaster and you choose to put your efforts into the latest buzzword trend instead of fixing the code review experience.

Not even mentioning your other competitors, the Jetbrains competitor isn't even a year old and already has a better PR experience.

Great.

[Noushin Kananian]

Good luck. 

Fantastic information. 

Thanks for sharing your invaluable knowledge and experience. 

[Edmund Munday]

Hi @Aron Gombas _Midori_ 

Sorry I took ages to get back to you. We've recently gone live with our open EAP of Forge in Bitbucket Cloud, which is what all these capabilities will be based on.

Can I ask a favour of you? Head over to the new Community Group for Forge Beta and request to join. Once you're in, can you please start a discussion thread with your questions from here?

I'd like to have the conversation in that context because it's something that whole community would be interested in.

Group link: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Bitbucket-Cloud-x-Forge-EAP/gh-p/bitbucket-cloud-forge

[Aron Gombas _Midori_]

@Edmund Munday Request to join sent!

[Aron Gombas _Midori_]

@Edmund Munday I created two questions in the group!

[Inna S]

Hi, @Ash Moosa is there any control available to the BB admin re enabling the AI access to the code base?

Thank you.

[Ash Moosa]

@Inna S Currently, AI cannot access your code base. It is only enabled on the PR description editor and comment editor.  This is currently in beta. See this post for more info: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Atlassian-Intelligence/Atlassian-Intelligence-features-for-Bitbucket-Cloud-are-now-in/ba-p/2499126

[Inna S]

@Ash Moosa I do not have an access to the linked page.

[Ash Moosa]

@Inna S Sorry, this link should work https://bitbucket.org/blog/atlassian-intelligence-features-for-bitbucket-cloud-are-now-in-beta 

[xicond]

Generative AI in text editors seems doesnt work when update