Simplify code review in Bitbucket with resolvable comments

[#1]

Code review can be a labor-intensive activity for engineering teams, often involving multiple iterations of feedback between a pull request author and reviewers. It’s common for pull requests to accumulate numerous comments in the diff, which can become challenging to navigate. PR authors want to feel confident they’ve addressed all their teammates' feedback, and reviewers also want to verify this before giving approval.

Today Bitbucket is introducing a new feature to make this process smoother: resolvable pull request comment threads. We’re happy to be addressing another one of our customers' most popular feature requests.

Comment resolution is live now for all customers on Bitbucket Cloud, and it’s also available in the recent 8.9 LTS release of Bitbucket Data Center.

On pull requests, comment threads in the file diff now include a “Resolve” action:

Once a thread has been resolved, it’s automatically collapsed by default. This keeps resolved threads tucked away, allowing the PR author and reviewers to focus on comments that haven’t yet been addressed.

To see the details of a resolved comment thread, just click to expand it. Resolved comments can be reopened (using the “Reopen” action) if anyone feels the thread still needs attention.

During code review, you can also click on an unresolved comment thread to collapse it visually, without resolving the thread. This can be useful when a comment thread is long enough to be distracting. Unresolved threads are always expanded when the page is reloaded.

Note: The pull request Activity tab shows an entry when a comment gets added to a PR. You won’t see a separate Activity entry when a comment thread gets resolved.

Available in both Cloud and Data Center

The resolvable comments feature is available today to all users of Bitbucket Cloud. It’s also now live in Bitbucket Data Center with the recent 8.9 LTS release. Learn more about that release here.

There’s more to come!

We’re not done with improvements to pull request comments in Bitbucket Cloud. In the near future, we’ll be making it easier to navigate comment threads in a PR, to save reviewers time spent scrolling through a PR on return visits.

We ❤️ feedback

As always, if you have feedback on this feature, we'd love to hear from you. You can share your thoughts by doing to the Bitbucket help menu > “Give feedback”.

[Aron Gombas]

Dave,

It is great that you're working on the PR experience, especially on Bitbucket Cloud.

While you are at it, I'd welcome an online editor to make minor changes directly in the diff while reviewing a PR. There is an app for the self-hosted Bitbucket variants which does it, and it can be huge time-saver for fixing small stuff.

[Vivek Chauhan]

Great to see this @Dave Parrish _Atlassian_ 

I have one more suggestion to have "All Comments Resolved" as a checklist item in the Pull Request just like "All Tasks resolved", which will be huge time boost.

This will help us stop the need of Tasks and comments could be only thing to track for code reviews

In any PR which is more than few lines and having multiple comments, as per my understanding there is currently no way to know the overall status and the reviewer needs to see comment by comment.

Thanks
Vivek

[Ken Overly]

Combine this with BCLOUD-16645 Add the ability too see all comments for the pull request and we'll finally have two core PR features that other platforms have had for almost a decade.

[Mia Paulin]

@Dave Parrish _Atlassian_   I like the feature.  I like how it helps everyone, no matte who they are or where they are in their Atlassian journey.  It helps me the way it helps others trying to progress not just in their career growth but personal growth- and this implementation is no respector of persons- it's for everyone, from tceh support to admins to developers and even corporate.  Doesn't discriminate on you position or knowledge level.  It truly is for everyone.  It uplifts people- like datacenter and server implementations- as far as their career and skill growth- and this solution is a learning tool that will help people advance, go further in their skillset and pursue their goals.  That's what the community and product do for all the customers- they build customer experiences and customer solutions to get them where they need to bein their Atlassian journey, no matter who they are.  I like it because I, myself, am learning.  I, myself, have mentors in the field. I, myself, have mentored people in other walks of life, because I like to see be do well, be uplifted and reach their goals, which in learning different solutions, which this is one of them, is an important step of growth.  Growth doesn't discriminate, neither does hard work or a curiosity for knowledge and learning.  I like this feature because it was created sincerely to help customers progress-at all levels.  So, thank you for all those who integrated solutions that remove hinderances in customer satisfaction, growth and furthering their customer service. >Specially, Cloud, Datacenter and everyone else whom has helped me and others in their learning.  You guys are awesome and appreciated.

[Mia Paulin]

@Dave Parrish _Atlassian_ I like the feature.  It makes it easier to go through your code!  Awesome job!

[Mia Paulin]

@Dave Parrish _Atlassian_  Good morning Dave!  I have a question about my pipeline.  I wrote it and it's not running the way it's suposed to.  In my validator, it keeps saying invalid code, but the only error is the part about a file of code block separator that supposed to be there that's not.  I checked everything and the syntax is correct, yet, it won't build my pipeline.  I used pipes to build it amd went over everything I studied in order to build it, yet, nithing happened.  Can you help me?

[Celso Tito Godoy]

Nice addition, is there any way to use a "resolve all comments" as a Merge Check?
I usually add comment AND click on change request, a feature to unify this just by comment could be nice.

[Ian Crossfield]

A great move! I hope the other features to come include:

• a summary review that focuses on the code that has been commented on
• ability to block merge until all comments resolved
• ability to raise a pull request with all comments in one hit, rather than each comment immediately being visible to everyone
• ability for users to opt in and out of notifications for comments and responses (even if they're a default reviewer)
• ability to mark a review in WIP and block the merge button

[Winyle Online]

This will definitely be a useful feature.

[Greg Dent]

Hi, is there any way to turn off or restrict this feature? We are seeing a lot of contractors abusing this by closing PR comments that they have not actually addressed, making it very hard to continue discussions or to verify that all of our comments have been resolved (since they are basically now just getting deleted).

We either need to have this disabled, or to make it so only the reviewer can resolve comment threads.

[Saxea _Flowie_]

@Celso Tito Godoy @Greg Dent @Vivek Chauhan @Ian Crossfield  

Flowie now has support for "no unresolved comments" merge check,  with the option to restrict who can resolve the comment in order for the check to pass. It also lets you navigate the unresolved comments easily. 

[Salaam Balochxada]

I am new here

[Jens Dämgen]

Is there a way to see all resolved comments? We sometimes put lots of time into comments when discussing implementations. It's imperative to refer back to such a comment. It should be possible to see it with a "resolved comments" filter. Did I miss it?  

[Celso Tito Godoy]

@Jens Dämgen 

Its possible, you should click in "comments" above the files and you will find all resolved comments.

[Jens Dämgen]

Excellent, thank you!

[John Morey]

Which actor (e.g. comment creator, person leaving reply expected to resolve the comment) is expected to execute the "resolve" action?  i.e. is it expected to tell the commenter that the reviewer expects the issue to be resolved or is it for the commenter to say they have accepted the resolution? Thanks for any insight.

[Matko Pecanic]

Somebody didn't think this through before forcing people to use it. Now there is no way to quickly search though all the comments. 

So when you receive a mail because you were tagged in a reply to a comment, which got resolved in the meantime, you won't be able to find it through search.

edit: i see github has the same issue but at least there is a workaround: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/show-resolved-github-pr-c/hnbjoejhkpeamoljhjfajojlofigdidj

edit 2: nevermind, i made an automation to show all hidden comments