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How do you keep PRs from sitting for days on Bitbucket Cloud?

How do you keep PRs from sitting for days on Bitbucket Cloud?

One of the most common issues with PR is they are stuck in review. Sometimes it takes 3 or 4 days before someone takes a look at them.

There is no way to see, like a dashboard of who's waiting, who's reviewing etc.

I'm curious how other teams handle this. Do you use anything that nudges people and tracks review turnaround? Maybe native bitbucket notifications, a slack bot(ReviewNudgeBot or Axolo), an analytics tool or manual poking people? What actually worked for you? What didn't?

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H, @zoltanersek _outpostlabs_dev_ 👋

In my experience, PRs sitting for days is usually less of a tooling problem and more of a "no clear ownership/no review SLA" problem. A few things that in my experience work well:

Set a team expectation for review time

For example: "first review within 1 working day" or "PRs should be picked up before starting new work." It sounds obvious, but without an explicit working agreement, PR review often becomes everyone’s second priority… which means nobody’s first priority 😅
Use default reviewers / required approvals

Bitbucket Cloud supports reviewers on pull requests, and you can also use merge checks to require approvals before merging. That does not solve speed by itself, but it makes ownership clearer. More info: https://support.atlassian.com/bitbucket-cloud/docs/suggest-or-require-checks-before-a-merge/
Connect Bitbucket Cloud with Slack

The native Slack integration can notify the team about PR activity and even supports actions like reminding outstanding reviewers from Slack. This is often the lowest-friction improvement if your team already lives in Slack. More info: https://support.atlassian.com/bitbucket-cloud/docs/integrate-bitbucket-cloud-with-slack/
Keep PRs small

Large PRs are where review speed goes to die. A small PR with a clear description is much easier to pick up between tasks.
Make PR review part of the daily routine

What I've also seen work: teams check open PRs during daily standup or have a dedicated "review before lunch/end of day" habit. This is surprisingly effective.
Use a bot or analytics tool if the team needs stronger nudges

If native notifications are not enough, Slack bots or analytics tools can help track PR age and reviewer load.

So my recommended starting point would be: define a review SLA, enable Slack notifications/nudges, and make stale PRs visible in the team routine. Tools help, but the real win is making review an expected part of the work, not an optional side quest.

Good luck! 💙

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thanks @Brita Moorus that's a great detailed answer, setting a review sla is something I started looking into at the moment

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We offer a Bitbucket app, Flowie, that improves the visibility of pull request (PR) review progress. It provides a detailed breakdown of each review, making it easy to see who has reviewed a PR, what work remains, and its overall review status.

Flowie also supports customizable labels, allowing you to organize PRs by status, priority, or any workflow that suits your team. For example, you can label high-priority PRs so reviewers can quickly identify which ones should be reviewed first.

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Hi @zoltanersek _outpostlabs_dev_

Welcome to the Community!

You're right that Bitbucket Cloud doesn't have a built-in "review dashboard" showing who's waiting and who's reviewing — it's a known gap

. Here's what's actually worked for teams I've been on, from lowest effort to most opinionated:

The native Bitbucket + Slack integration is the easiest starting point if your team is on Slack. The official Bitbucket for Slack app posts PR notifications to a channel, and there's a built-in "Nudge reviewers" button on each notification that sends a DM to the assigned reviewer. You configure which events trigger notifications per repository under Settings → Integrations → Slack. It's free, takes about five minutes to set up, and the nudge button alone eliminates a lot of the awkward "hey, could you look at my PR" DM cycle.

If the native integration doesn't feel proactive enough, ReviewNudgeBot is a Slack bot specifically built for this. It connects to Bitbucket Cloud via webhooks and sends customizable reminders at intervals you set — say every 4 hours, during working hours only (M–F 9–5). PR status gets tracked in threaded messages with emoji indicators, so you get a quick visual of where things stand. The team behind it references research showing about a 60% reduction in PR lifetime across thousands of teams using nudge-style reminders. It has a free tier if you want to test it before committing.

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Thank you @Ajay _view26_ it's good to know these options exist.

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How do you keep PRs from sitting for days on Bitbucket Cloud?

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