Introducing: A new Bitbucket pull request experience

[#1]

This feature update was also published on the Bitbucket blog.

Here at Bitbucket Cloud, we are focused on helping you and your teams have the best possible experience for code review. That’s why we continue to add features like batched comments, marking files as viewed, AI-assisted pull request descriptions – and coming very soon, iterative reviews.

We also want to give you the best possible experience navigating a pull request, which is why we’re proud to be introducing a brand-new layout for pull requests. It’s available for you to try as of today, and over the coming weeks we’ll be rolling it out to all of our users.

What’s new in the design?

The pull request page is the place in Bitbucket where your most critical work gets done, and we’ve consistently heard a couple areas of feedback that we wanted to address

• It can be difficult to understand what’s changed recently, which is critical when you’re returning to a pull request you’ve already viewed.
• Navigating PRs with a large number of files can be challenging with the existing sidebar file tree.

That’s why we’ve moved to a tabular design that puts recent activity front and center, as well as providing a dedicated diff tab for full-screen code review. This design was heavily influenced by our sister product Bitbucket Data Center, so those of you who have used BBDC will find our new layout particularly familiar.

Rich activity feed

Right away, you’ll notice that we’ve moved the activity feed from the right sidebar to its own prominent space on the Overview tab. Here you’ll find all the latest updates on the pull request – comments, approvals, new commits – in an easy-to-read format.

We’ve given particular attention to comment threads, which now include the context of code changes that they apply to. You can also reply to, resolve, and create tasks from comments right on the activity feed. And, when you need to, you can jump from a comment thread straight into the diff.

Focused code review

The Files changed tab provides a dedicated space for you to dive into code review. We’ve moved the file tree from the sidebar to the left of the page, a more natural location. If you like, you can fully collapse the file tree and side navigation for full-screen code review.

This new design for the diff includes all the viewing options you’re used to, like side-by-side code review, hiding whitespace changes, and loading files individually so you can focus on one file at a time.

We think this new diff view works particularly well in single-file mode. To switch this on, go to the Files changed tab, select the cog icon, and then choose the option to load files individually.

Available today

Starting May 13, we’ve made the new layout available to all Bitbucket Cloud users on an opt-in basis. If you’d like to be one of the first to try it, visit Labs in your Bitbucket settings, then switch on the New pull request experience feature.

In the coming weeks we’ll be gradually rolling out the new experience to users, so you can also just wait and you’ll see it automatically. We know it can take time to adjust to a new layout, so as we’re rolling out the feature, you will have the option to temporarily change back to the old view.

Starting June 10, the new layout will be fully rolled out, and we’ll permanently retire the old view.

We’d love your feedback

Here at Atlassian, our teams have already been seeing the benefits of working with this more streamlined view of pull requests. And while we are confident that your teams will have this same experience with the new layout, we would love to hear from you after you’ve had a chance to try it.

If you have any feedback whatsoever – or if you’ve found a bug – please head to the Bitbucket help menu > “Give feedback” to share your thoughts with us.

[Ulrich Kuhnhardt _IzymesCo_]

Hi @Dave Parrish _Atlassian_ 

looks great. Love the new UI.

I must have missed the RFC for this update. In case there wasn't an RFC, we would appreciate if you could add a section for BBCloud RFCs so we can give feedback early - in the 'impossible alone' spirit.

1. I personally find the comment UX a little noisy with duplication that could be simplified IMHO

2. Are there any new UI component plugin points (ACE or Forge) on the new PR view page? I could think of additional tabs ... which would be an absolute dream for app developers.

Thanks again for the great work on the PR page UI. Let me know if you need further details or please reach out any time.

Best, Ulrich

// Izymes

[Michael Rüegg _Mibex Software_]

I agree with @Ulrich Kuhnhardt _IzymesCo_ .

I like the redesign, but also think that app extensibility should be an important matter to consider when doing it. For that, an RFC would be welcome to discuss the viewpoint of the community that builds extensions for it.

Regarding extensions:

1. A way to add new tabs on the PR page for Forge apps would indeed be very appreciated.

2. Additionally, a way to add actions to the top-right context menu is important to migrate apps from Bitbucket DC, because there this is possible and used heavily by our apps.

3. Off topic: on the PR create page, there is no way to hook into the UI for apps. IMHO, that is important for Forge app adoption as well.

[Dave Parrish _Atlassian_]

Hi @Ulrich Kuhnhardt _IzymesCo_ and @Michael Rüegg _Mibex Software_ 👋 thanks so much for the feedback.

Now that we have the new layout in customers' hands, we are actively exploring options for extensibility, including all of the ones you mention. We will definitely share our early thoughts with the developer community.

[Ulrich Kuhnhardt _IzymesCo_]

@Dave Parrish _Atlassian_ are you considering adding extension points to PR create page, as @Michael Rüegg _Mibex Software_ suggested?

[Ian Hunter]

I know there are always naysayers and someone is always going to complain about every change, but I've tried the new "experience" and it's truly upsetting.  What was wrong with having everything relevant to the PR co-located on the same view?

> Right away, you’ll notice that we’ve moved the activity feed from the right sidebar to its own prominent space on the Overview tab.

It's not prominent, it's hidden away on a tab that I don't want to have to switch to - the diff is what's relevant, and I used to be able to see the activity, and the tasks, and the merge checks, and everything else without leaving the diff.  Adding extra clicks and scrolling and browser requests and load times and manually searching to get back to what I was looking at on the other tab has not improved my experience; quite the opposite!

> We’ve given particular attention to comment threads, which now include the context of code changes that they apply to.

I don't know if it's bugged at the moment, but there most definitely is not context of the code in the activity list on my PRs with the lab enabled.  Even if there was, how do you presume to know how many lines of context are actually required to understand the comment?

Imagine you manufactured cars, and someone thought it was a good design to make a car where you could either have access to the front windscreen and the steering wheel, or the brake pedal and the instrument cluster, but not all at the same time.  And when you switch back to the steering wheel, it has reset itself to the initial position.  But don't worry, the instrument cluster is in a new prominent space, on the floor between your feet, and while you're looking down there there's a little LED screen to show you the context of where you are on the road, but only 2 feet in front of you and behind you.  I can imagine Atlassian Auto greenlighting that design...

[Michał Fastyn]

Bravo @Ian Hunter 
This "new new" experience (yes, we had one new experience not so long ago) is a "clickfest" and "scrollfest"

• Who thinks that going to activity tab first instead of code is good idea?
• Why during review I can't see PR description where we f.e. put screenshot of what has changed. Now I can't read code and see screenshot at the same time. How does this help me?
• And going back & forth is horrible! I cant change tab when I'm half way through review because this will mean my view will be reset. Happy scrolling back where you was!
• When you comment on whole PR just after you create it (using comment under description) guess where this comment will be after few comments to code. Yep. On the deep bottom of "overview" somewhere down there where no one will ever see it. Before changes this comments were stick to the PR top where anyone could see it, always. Now this will be worth nothing on the bottom of overview. 

This is sooo frustrating. Last time you did "new" experience you removed quite a lot of features that were available earlier and we waited months to get them back. You always do it like that. "We have this new cool stuff for you! But...". There is always hidden "But".

After years of using BB this is next example from atlassian that you always try to fix something by creating new sets of problems or by removing features.

There are like tones of requests to give us simple features that would make our life easier. They are floating there for YEARS with hundreds of "+1".
Examples? Resolvable comments (2013),  making files as viewed, code coloring. This are NOT your ideas but community requested features hanging for YEARS that you at last were kind enough to implement.

Couldn't you put this effort for making this everyday things we really need like GIT hooks or anything from this list instead of giving us next "new experience" that we will have to get use to?

With regards.

[Joris Vandermeersch]

Chiming in here to ask, why would we want the actual diff to be hidden in a separate tab? Why would we be more interested in the activity feed? At best, the activity feed provides some context for the actual diff, which isn't useful unless you can see the diff; at worst, it is purely noise and not valuable at all.

I can honestly say I didn't ever look at the activity feed before, never needed it, it was hidden away in a separate tab in the sidebar and it didn't (and still doesn't) provide any useful information to me.

[Carlo Riccio]

nice

[Ren]

I've been testing it and noticed it introduces an alignment issue with Bitbucket apps, because of the non-standard alignment of the sync now message:

[Cody]

Please, please, please keep the old UI as an option until some of this feedback is addressed.

I have 2 major issues:

1. As others have already lamented, switching between the tabs is an issue.

2. PLEASE give me back my vertical screen real estate. In the Files Changed tab the header w/ the tabs is sticky and combined w/ the PR title and nav bar and URL bar the actual diff is now relegated to the bottom 2/3rds of my screen (as per your own screenshot in the above post), which is a huge issue -- this is not even close to full screen. And that's only after I've collapsed both menus on the left, otherwise the diff is loses almost half the horizontal screen real estate as well!!! 

[Jordan Brown]

I agree. The new clickfest experience is not ideal. I'm sure we'll get used to it though. A single view experience was a lot better. Also when I create a top level comment in the overview section it just gets squashed together with the file and line comments. A bit confusing. We're so far not seeing how this new experience benefits us but I need to go through the blog and details more and keep reviewing the changes.

[Jordan Brown]

I think this is a good time (since y'all are making major changes to the PR experience) to remind the bitbucket team about a strongly asked for request: Preview-merge diff type on demand . Could you reconsider this soon? 

Here's some another one to consider too: Default reviewers applicable to specific branch . Could you prioritize this?

I could find some more that we're interested in for sure! One that I can't find a feature request for (yet) and is related to the pull request experience is better capabilities to have different code-owners  per branch. Yeah you can have a different CODEOWNERS file per branch and "your code owners configuration is always read from the destination branch of a pull request" as y'alls docs here state, https://support.atlassian.com/bitbucket-cloud/docs/set-up-and-use-code-owners/, but the problem happens when you're using some level of Gitflow strategy (https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/comparing-workflows/gitflow-workflow) like we are. We use feature branches and long lasting branches per environment (dev branch, stage/uat/preprod branch, and master branch for prod). Based on what I'm hearing this branching strategy is one of the fairly common approaches out there in the industry. For this setup, all feature branches if they want to be deployed through prod have to go through each required long lasting branch and finally to master. With that said, we can't use bitbucket's code owners feature today since the CODEOWNERS file from the feature branch would go /merge to each environment specific long running branch and eventually master. Ultimately in this strategy each long running branch would have the same CODEOWNERS file. Therefore each CODEOWNERS file on each destination has the same code owners setup. Why is this a problem? For us we typically only want code owners on the master branch (for prod environment). There are some edge cases where other long running branches may need CODEOWNERS too but definitely not all and the CODEOWNERS may very per branch. We don't want the same CODEOWNERS file across all branches. With this fairly common branching strategy CODEOWNERS file fails to work. I mean it could be done in a hacky way but let's not get into that. CODEOWNERS file needs a way to set branch specific CODEOWNERS to satisfy this common use case. My colleague asked y'all about this and y'all said this feature isn't available yet. I just put in an atlassian support ticket (https://support.atlassian.com/requests/BBS-218492) to see if they can point me to a related feature request or create a feature request on my behalf for that. I know code-owners is a fairly new feature in bitbucket cloud so maybe this request is something already in their pipeline (fingers crossed).  Can you please work on this really useful feature soon? 

There's a lot of subtle, maybe not so flashy, improvements y'all could do to your existing platform and features which your existing customer base would really appreciate!! Some of what y'all do is starting to be a running joke across organizations. Vendor lock in is a real thing (nice safety net for you) but why not shoot for 4 or 5 stars with your current customers!  Examples listed above again may not be related to the hot tech in the industry today or the latest and greatest buzz words, but are important tweaks to existing features which could use some improvements and attention. 

Thanks for listening!

[Jordan Brown]

related to codeowners point I was making above and adding new options there, there is a feature request already for what I describe above (link_to_previous_comment): codeowners specific branch restrictions feature request . Atlassian support provided that to me. Consider that please in the not too distant future as part of future improvements to the Bitbucket PR experience!

[Michael Bates]

Annoying layout as I now have to click into the the 2nd tab to be able to see what is important - what files have changed. An option to set a default tab would be welcome.

[Michał Fastyn]

@Dave Parrish _Atlassian_ vanished. Same story, like always. I love how they always "would like to hear our feedback" but in reality  they just announce that we will be forced to use what they think is the best for us. You can always request feature and wait for "gathering interest" for next few years, right?

[gvasoin]

Was changed today without asking, first thing I noticed is that the diff, you know, the part of the code one is reviewing, is hidden in another tab, with less screen space to even view it. Reverted immediately by disabling in labs, only to get a "happy" reminder that this bullshit will be forced on us in one week. Happy coding indeed.

[LSDemian]

This is horrible. What is this empty space for?? It takes so much vertical screen space. This UI is almost unusable on a 13' display now

[Dave Parrish _Atlassian_]

Hi all 👋 Still here, although I haven't jumped into the comments lately. Thank you very much for the candid feedback. I can tell you about a few usability improvements that we're making in response to this and other feedback we've received.

1. Keyboard shortcuts ( 1 2 3 ) for navigating tabs. We acknowledge it, the move to a tabbed layout is a huge change. And I hear the frustration about not having the code be the default tab selected. To make life slightly easier, we've added keyboard shortcuts so that you can quickly navigate among the tabs. `1` for overview, `2` for files changed, `3` for commits. And we've got more shortcuts coming for collapsing the file tree, navigating between files, marking files as viewed, moving between comments, approval, and other common tasks. You can always see the latest list of supported keyboard shortcuts by hitting `?` on any page in Bitbucket.
2. Reducing sticky header size for smaller screens. We'll be slimming down the sticky header for smaller screens, to give you back some of that vertical real estate. Expect to see this in the next day or two.
3. Showing the number of files modified. We have a bug where the "files changed" tab doesn't show the number of files modified until you click on it. Fix in progress.

I hope that you will keep the feedback coming. I'll be honest, some of it's hard to hear, but that is part of the job. And it's hard to make a change this big without real disruption to people's lives. So please, keep it coming. I appreciate people's willingness to comment publicly here, and the in-product help menu will always allow you to give private feedback.

While we're here, I'll drop a few hints of what's to come for Bitbucket.

• In-product notifications. This shipped as of today. Hopefully it makes your life a little bit easier, especial when your work day involves multiple Atlassian products.
• Iterative review. We're dogfooding this now and will have it in your hands by month's end! Really excited about this one.
• Sync via rebase. Currently in the works.
• Dark theme. For real. Coming later this year!

[Ian Hunter]

> I hear the frustration about not having the code be the default tab selected. To make life slightly easier, we've added keyboard shortcuts so that you can quickly navigate among the tabs

@Dave Parrish _Atlassian_  You know what would make life more than _slightly_ easier?  Don't make us deal with these tabs in the first place.  Or, you know, at the very least default to showing the code diff like everyone is asking for......?  Seems like a no-brainer.

> And we've got more shortcuts coming

Nooooo :'( Shortcut keys are _horrible_ - I've had to turn them off on Jira because it's so annoying when your text input has lost focus without you noticing, you start typing, and suddenly you've changed 20 things by accident and you don't even know what they were.  Please at least make them deliberate key combinations, not just random single key-presses...

> I'll drop a few hints of what's to come for Bitbucket.

Those things (maybe not the notifications so much) sound wonderful!  They add functionality/value and enhance what already works, as opposed to crippling UX for no apparent reason.  Thank you for finally addressing some of the things your users have been begging for for years (sync via rebase was requested in 2013).  I'm trying to be grateful and give positive feedback where it's due but there's still a bitter taste here.

Do Atlassian devs use Bitbucket?  Are they really and truly enjoying the new "experience"?  If you've done an anonymous internal survey and it's overwhelmingly positive, then fine, I'll shut up and go away and just get used to jumping through the unnecessary hoops.

[Dave Parrish _Atlassian_]

@Ian Hunter Hiya! The keyboard shortcuts will follow common conventions used across Atlassian products. Some single key, some multi key. If they're driving you crazy, you can always turn off keyboard shortcuts in your personal settings. https://bitbucket.org/account/settings/

We have thousands of engineers in Atlassian that use Bitbucket everyday, so we're lucky to have a very captive audience when we introduce new features. We always dogfood ahead of a big release like this one, and we've certainly gotten some helpful constructive criticism along with primarily positive feedback.

Here's hoping that the new layout will present some unexpected benefits after you've used it for a time. For now, thank you for being honest about your experience. I understand it's been a rough go.

[Zoltan Lukacs]

Hey there, thanks for the new update on pull requests!

Just a quick question... In the "files changed" tab, is it somehow possible to have the file tree on the right side?

It used to be for the old view and i would love to have it configurable for the new one as well, since its eating up a lot of space.

[Scott Eble]

Now being forced to use this new view, I have to agree with everything Ian Hunter has said.  In particular, these things:

• Not being able to see the right sidebar in the same view as the code is very inconvenient. 
• Having high level comments on the PR be buried in the activity feed is not ideal.
• Moving the file list to the left would be fine without already having the left nav there.  With both, it moves the code view far to the right.  I know I can collapse one or both, but I prefer to have them open.
• The default tab should absolutely be the Files Changed, or configurable in preferences.

[Cameron Wilson]

I would just simply like an option to go back to the old way. I'm not a fan of having to click through things to find out everything I need to know. It's more confusing to me

[Tim]

Hi Atlassian,

I am a big supporter of change, but that said i prefer it is in the direction of improvement.

With the changes over the last couple years of using bitbucket. I sometimes found myself wondering if i liked it. But often you guys made our lives easier, and thus changing my way was ok.

So kudos for the last years of development!

I do believe that you have developed some new features into the new UI flow that might be good. Maybe it would have been a nice approach to implement those first before throwing everything around.

However that being said...

First off, I like to give props to the commentators above, for basically summarizing my feelings to a T. But for clarity i'd like to repeat them anyways.

- First tab should be the thing used to most: which is files changed. In our work flow, at least 2 people review the entire code change and place comments. Then the one creating looks at the comments and adjusts the code when needed. It is nice to see a activity for that purpose but then again it is also nice to see the code around the comment to see what else could be relevant.

- There are many plugins that are now on the first tab, also pipelines/approvals are there, which are more relevant whenever you are reviewing, when you are done with your review and you wish to merge/approve the request. So this information would be very nice on the files changes tab, maybe as a collapsible side menu?

- Also on the files changed tab I prefer to have the files on the right. I always learned in school that people work from left top to right bottom when they are searching for something. Having to put the most important stuff closest to the left top corner. An optional menu for files that are otherwise shown below each other is not as important as the files themselves thus i would move the file content to the left and the list to the right.

- I think the most painful thing for me is the scroll that removes the tabs at the top. I believe this is due to my screen being smaller than 1920x1080. See below. So whenever I am on the file changes page, and I review all the files, I first have to scroll to the top, then having to go to the first tab to see who has approved this pull request already to see if I can merge it.

The next time that you plan to roll out a revamp of a view, I think it would be in everyone's best interests to get some community feedback early on. Because i can understand since we are all programmers ourselves that it might be painful after you have released a feature you have worked on for a long time to be not well received by the community.

Kind regards,

Tim

[Paweł Wiśniewski]

Thanks, I hate it.

This new UI is simply terrible. Not a single person in my team has any positive things to say about those changes. It's troublesome to use, disrupts workflows, personally speaking - it's just ugly and unintuitive.

I see no positives to this change at all, and I can't understand why did you think it's a good idea to force this on us. At the very least you could leave the old design as an option for those unwilling to adopt your "new experience".