How to apply simple approval workflow within small team?

Question

We have a BitBucket server in a small team. There are several repositories and seldom update. In order to meet company compliance, all the code changes required a "maker/checker" review. That means every change by developer A, require developer B to review and sign (approval). Developer B's change can be approved by any one in the team, depends on who is on duty.

Because our changes tend to be very simple, I would like to avoid using "branch". We would like to keep only one main stream.

Without using branch, is there any OOTB way to apply approval workflow?

Mark_zs89xm · Answer

Hi Ana,

Thanks for answer. I have configure Minimum approvals = 1 in project settings and the repository settings have inheritance enabled.

However I have tried merge several branches. All of them can be merged without any restriction. No approval request is triggered. Am I missed something?

I am too green to BitBucket. Could you suggest me a simple scenario to trigger a simple approval workflow/request?

Mark_zs89xm · Answer

test

Ana Retamal · Answer

Hi @Mark, welcome to the Community!

My understanding is that you'd like to have your developers working directly on master, and have someone else review their changes before they're actually pushed to master. It looks like you're describing the behavior of pull requests and merge checks, with the caveat that branches are required for that kind of workflow. In that scenario, your developer would make his change in a separate branch and whenever he's ready to merge his changes he'd make a pull request, then the changes would wait to be reviewed by another colleague, and only when approved the changes will appear in master.

'Merge checks' is a feature provided by Bitbucket and that allows for a set of conditions to be required before the changes are merged with the main branch. One of the merge checks included with Bitbucket is 'minimum approvers', which requires at least the specified number of approvals before the changes can be merged. You can learn more about this feature at Checks for merging pull requests.

There are different ways of working with branches and it doesn't have to be complicated. You can find some useful examples like the Gitflow workflow or Feature-branch workflow, but you can also work together with your team and come up with the workflow that would work better for you.

I hope that helps you, Mark. If you have any questions regarding this feature, let us know and we'll be happy to help you.

Best regards,

Ana