Play it safe or speed it up – The new pull request experience with Workzone for Bitbucket

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Can you believe it? Revoking pull request reviewer approvals when the pull request diff changes is not an out-of-the-box feature of your Bitbucket Datacenter installation! Thanks to the Atlassian Marketplace there is a free Auto-Unapprove app maintained by Atlassian that you can install. Yayy, but:

While it is important to encourage reviewers to return to the pull request and re-approve it, indicating they have verified the new changes….

That’s only 33.33% of the story: There are 2 more scenarios that are not covered;

1. All reviewers must re-approve for regulatory compliance, even if there was no effective change to the diff of the pull request.
2. Only a few reviewers need to re-approve because their files are affected by an update.

In our latest update, Workzone for Bitbucket 9.1.0, we’ve added configuration options for those to help companies stay ahead in both regulatory compliance and code quality management. Read on!

Strict approval mode – play it safe

This update introduces a repository hook that can automatically revoke all pull request approvals whenever any commit is made to the source branch. This includes rebase or squash commits — changes that might not alter the code itself but still affect the commit history.

Why This Feature Matters

Imagine a developer consolidates multiple commits into one through a rebase or squash. Even though the code remains unchanged, this new commit may still require review, especially in environments with strict regulatory requirements. By revoking existing approvals, Workzone ensures that all commits—whether they modify the code or not—are re-evaluated, providing a more stringent check on the codebase’s integrity.

Benefits for Companies

1. Enhanced Compliance: Many regulated industries, such as finance or healthcare, mandate that all code modifications, no matter how minor, must go through an approval process. This new feature aligns with these standards by enforcing re-approvals, reinforcing the accountability of each commit.
2. Improved Code Integrity: Requiring re-approval whenever a branch is updated helps to maintain a reliable history of code reviews, ensuring that the final merged code reflects only thoroughly reviewed changes.
3. Streamlined Process Control: By automating approval revocation of pull requests, Workzone reduces the risk of overlooked commits and simplifies the review process for complex workflows. This is particularly helpful for larger teams working with branching strategies that include rebases or squashes.

For companies aiming to achieve or maintain compliance standards, this feature provides an extra layer of security, ensuring that only the most rigorously reviewed code makes it to production. To learn more about other compliance-related features within Workzone, click here.

Hight velocity approval mode – speed it up

On the other side of the equation, Workzone can help your team speed up the approval process by leveraging context-aware reviewer approval status control. Great, big words: what’s behind it?

If there are file and/or module-based reviewers configured in Workzone, any new commits that are added to an existing pull request should revoke already given approvals, but only the ones that are relevant to the newly updated files, not all given approvals.

Specifying include and exclude file/path patterns for pull request reviewers with Workzone

Why this matters

Repetitive and redundant work (speak pull request reviews) is extremely annoying for fast-moving teams. Why should team members re-approve changes they have already signed off on? That’s an insult and a waste of time, slows down the process, introduces delays and leads to a poor Pull Request Experience in general.

Well, leaders and managers love their processes, and we all have to follow them to get a bonus at the end of the year, right? But why not change the pull request review process to speed up team velocity without giving up control and attention to detail!

This is exactly where Workzone’s context-aware reviewer approval status control comes in. And, you don’t have to do or change anything, it just works in the background.

Benefits for companies

1. Greatly improved pull request experience for reviewers. No more redundant re-approvals.
2. Massive time savings. 90% of pull request updates are small changes that address review comments.
3. Improved release velocity. Pull request review iterations are kept to a minimum.
4. No compromise on quality and thoroughness. Every change still gets reviewed and approved, but only once.

If you and your team are up for a better pull request process and greatly improved team velocity, give Workzone a try.

Here is how you do it;

1. Install – Or visit Workzone on the Marketplace here

2. Configure module/file reviewers

3. Turn on the magic

4. Sit back and watch your dev team’s G.S.D. – velocity go 

If you want to learn more time-saving tricks with Bitbucket + Workzone – Here is another article worth reading

We’ll share more recipes next week – till then, happy coding…

Sean Manwarring,

Izymes

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