Reduce effort with Branching Model now in Bitbucket Cloud!

[Linette]

Hi Bitbucket community friends,

We'd heard that people loved the branching model in Bitbucket Server, because without it inconsistent naming results in slower workflow and general confusion. Then, even when you’ve decided on a naming scheme, it's a pain to keep typing the same thing, and errors easily slip in.

We had a lot of people asking when it was coming to Bitbucket Cloud, so I'm really excited to say that it has!

Basically, when enabled, your default branch type names are set to Bugfix, Feature, Hotfix, and Release (which can be individually turned off, or edited, to match your naming convention, also you can specify other if you need to create a one-off branch with a different name).

Then if you combine this with Branch Permissions, you can make sure all branches of a certain type can only be merged by nominated team members, which reduces the "oooops! I merged to master!!" panics.

As an added bonus if you’ve got Jira and Bitbucket connected, your new branches in Jira Software will automatically select the relevant branch type for the Jira issue type, for example: bug → bugfix/ and story → feature/.

We’ve made this feature available for all Bitbucket repos.  But we don’t want to surprise your team in the middle of working on an existing repo, so you’ll need to specifically enable it to enjoy the benefits. However, new repos will have the feature enabled by default (this can be changed in repository settings).

This is the first step in a set of features to help your teams work with branches more easily, so we are really keen to hear your feedback! You can leave it either here in the comments or use the Feedback button in Bitbucket. Will this make things easier for you? Have you been waiting for it? Is it not quite there yet? How can we help you more?

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!

Linette

Bitbucket Content Designer

[Mark Dorros]

Good to see - good start! Requests to improve the feature:

1. While this is very helpful for branches created within the BB UI and from JIRA, I'd like to see enforcement of the branching model for branches created from the command line, IDE, etc. Currently, with the branching model set, I can create a branch with any prefix. I'd like to restrict it to the prefixes in the repo's configuration.
2. Provide for default settings that are different from the canned settings, so when a new repo is created, it gets the default settings.
3. Allow setting the branching model through the API.

[Linette]

Thanks Mark! These are all great ideas, and I can see how they'd be useful. I'll pass them on to the team for consideration.

[Geoff Willings]

Loving it! This is a really nice update and the options match almost exactly our existing naming conventions - spooky.

There is one notable exception - "refactor/". We'll often branch to refactor code for greater flexibility, efficiency, performance or security,

I know we can add our own under "other", but if you added this option it would be pretty much perfect for us. 

[Linette]

yay! I'm so glad it's working out for you.

I love the idea of a refactor branch, and it fits very well with the methodology of continuous improvement. I'll pass this recommendation on to the team!

[Geoff Willings]

Thanks, that would be awesome. 

[Matthias Fischer]

I waited for it very long, thx for implementing it :)

One question about the integration in Jira and Gitflow:

If i start a new branch from a User Story, the new branch with Feature-Namespace has to be taken from develop-branch but there is always the master-Branch preselected. Can I change the presets somewhere? Otherwise this can be really risky ;)

[Linette]

At the moment you can't... buuuuut... watch this space, we've got something coming out in the next few weeks that should make your dreams a reality! :)

[Mauro Jurincic]

Waiting for this functionality as well ;)