New in pull requests: Batched comments 🎉

[#1]

This feature update was also published on the Bitbucket blog.

Bitbucket Cloud is excited to introduce a new feature to streamline the way you communicate pull request feedback to your colleagues. You now have the option on pull requests to batch comments into a single review. By doing this, you submit all your feedback at once, letting other PR participants know – with a single email notification – that you have finished your code review.

Whether you’re a pull request author or reviewer, you can use this new feature to streamline your communication with other PR participants. No more leaving a comment, having a notification go out, and then finding out that it's been addressed later in the code. And everyone working on the PR will get way fewer email notifications.

Let’s take a look at how it works.

A new commenting workflow

When you add a comment to a pull request, you will now see two new buttons.

The Start review button will start a review session. Any comments or tasks you add during the review session are marked as pending, meaning they’ll be visible only to you until you submit them. (The Add comment now button allows you to add the comment to the PR immediately, just like the Save button used to do.)

When you’ve finished your code review, the Finish review button allows you to submit your feedback to the author and approve or request changes along with your review.

Once you submit the review, the comments and tasks will become visible to your colleagues working on the pull request. They’ll get a single email notification with a summary of all of your feedback, making it clear to them that you’ve finished your review.

Try it today

This feature is available today for all users of Bitbucket Cloud. Atlassian teams have been testing it while it’s been under development, and we are loving the way it has simplified the communication loop between the PR author and reviewers.

Of course, we may be a bit biased 😁 so we’d love hear how it’s working for you and your colleagues. Our product team loves hearing from our user community, and we read every piece of feedback that you submit. You can share your thoughts with us by going to the help ‘?’ menu > Give feedback.

[Ulrich Kuhnhardt _IzymesCo_]

Looks great, @Dave Parrish _Atlassian_ 

Can a reviewer's pending review be checked by a merge-condition, i.e. 'No pending reviews' similar to 'All tasks resolved'? Cheers Ulrich

[Dave Parrish _Atlassian_]

Great suggestion @Ulrich Kuhnhardt _IzymesCo_! A merge check for "no pending reviews" is something we considered during implementation, and it could definite be incredibly useful.

We decided that such a merge condition could present a problem if someone started a review but then subsequently got distracted or became unavailable to complete it, perhaps due to some well-deserved holiday time off. :) This would block an otherwise mergeable PR from getting merged, with no way to get unblocked other than declining and re-raising the PR, since only the author of the review has the permission to complete it.

There are probably some reasonable accommodations we could make for this scenario (allow a repo admin to cancel the review in progress? auto cancel reviews after N days of inactivity?) but on balance it seemed best to put the batched comments feature out into the wild without a merge check, and gain more insight/feedback into how people are using it.

Incidentally, we did think it was important to notify someone who is about to merge a PR that there are reviews still in progress. That's done with this message:

This is the one place in the UI that we surface in-progress reviews to anyone other than the reviewers themselves.

Now, it might be interesting to show that information in other places too, right? Perhaps an in-progress affordance on the reviewer's avatar, as we do for approval/changes requested? It's probably pretty useful information to other people working on the PR. Along with a merge check, it's something we will consider for the future.

Thanks again for the feedback- keep it coming!

[Ulrich Kuhnhardt _IzymesCo_]

Thanks @Dave Parrish _Atlassian_ for the quick reply.

Suppose I have a PR with 2 pending comments and by calling the PR comments REST API I get an empty array in the response.

When I finish the review the same API call returns both comments {pending: false}.

I had hoped to retrieve all pending PR comments with {pending: true} before finishing the PR review.

Do you agree that the REST API PR comments endpoint should return pending comments? 

Thanks for your help. Best, Ulrich

[Ulrich Kuhnhardt _IzymesCo_]

Hi @Dave Parrish _Atlassian_ - do you have any updates on this potential bug? I'm not able to create an issue in BCLOUD :(

[Dave Parrish _Atlassian_]

Hi @Ulrich Kuhnhardt _IzymesCo_ 👋 Short answer, we don't consider this to be a bug. The REST API only returns pending comments if the person making the request is the user who started the review session, and this is by design. Effectively what we're saying is, a pending comment is not (yet) a real comment. This was a conceptual decision that we made very intentionally during the design of this feature.

That said, there are absolutely some developer use cases that we're not yet accounting for, and it could be useful for apps to have visibility into pending comments, and in fact to do write operations on batched reviews (see my latest comment on BCLOUD-14900). I am happy to raise a BCLOUD feature request on your behalf if you'd like to provide some of the details. Feel free to reply here or drop me an email at dparrish at atlassian dot com. Thanks!

[Ulrich Kuhnhardt _IzymesCo_]

Thanks for your reply Dave, much appreciated.

A developer use case is always a customer/business use case, right ? :-) Not sure if that has an influence on the priority.

In any case I opened https://support.atlassian.com/requests/BBS-211613/ to follow up on this 'business use case'.

Thanks, Ulrich

[adesentenacgee]

"Perhaps an in-progress affordance on the reviewer's avatar" that would be a great addition, right now there no way to know at a glance if someone is already reviewing a PR, so you either need to manually add a comment in the PR before starting the batched comments or use an external tool to let the rest of the team know, both aren't great options.

[Noushin Kananian]

Good luck. 

[fersarr man]

how can I disable this feature? I prefer to send comments one at a time. Sometimes I just write two comments and leave the page and they have not been sent. Many of my colleagues also think they have submitted their comments but they haven't and that delays the process.

[Ash Moosa]

@fersarr man If you click on 'add comment now' it will publish immediately. Did that not work for you?

[bchester404]

How do I disable this feature entirely? It's not useful at all for us, and just makes our workflow more annoying by making the default action for a comment not just add the comment. PRs comments can be conversations, bulk sending doesn't make sense at all in that context.

[Saxea _Flowie_]

@adesentenacgee 

"Perhaps an in-progress affordance on the reviewer's avatar" that would be a great addition, right now there no way to know at a glance if someone is already reviewing a PR, so you either need to manually add a comment in the PR before starting the batched comments or use an external tool to let the rest of the team know, both aren't great options.

You might want to check out Flowie, our addon for Bitbucket has support for this!

[Alexey Shurygin]

how in the world do I disable this feature? have you spoken to your users at all? are you listening?

[Ian Hunter]

After clicking "Finish Review" batched comments are pushed to slack in random order smh.

> how in the world do I disable this feature? have you spoken to your users at all? are you listening?

Oh my sweet summer child.

[tineyi]

We need to disable this feature completely. It is not useful at all and has stalled our team's productivity because these batched comments just sit in a pending state forever.