Hello, Bitbucket Cloud Community!
We are incredibly excited to announce the introduction of Iterative review, a feature designed to help your team get pull requests completed faster by removing the need to re-review code you’ve already seen. Now when an author pushes new commits based on your pull request (PR) feedback, you’ll have the option to focus on just those new changes.
How it works
Any time you finish reviewing a pull request, Bitbucket makes note of the last commit you viewed. For purposes of this feature, here are the different actions that constitute “reviewing”:
- Approving the PR
- Requesting changes
- Marking all files as viewed
- Submitting batched comments (with or without approval status)
When the author makes new commits to the PR, you’ll then have the option to view just the changes made since your last review. This is possible thanks to a new dropdown on the “Files changed” tab that controls your diff view for the pull request.
By default this dropdown is set to “All changes”, meaning you’re be looking at the full changeset on the source branch. This is the view that we’ve always shown on pull requests. When you switch the dropdown to “Changes since last review”, Bitbucket then shows you just the files changed in the commit(s) since you last reviewed the PR. The number next to “Files changed” is updated to reflect the number of files you’re viewing.
The “Changes since last review” option will only appear when a PR has new commits that you haven’t seen. Remember that your last-reviewed commit is specific to you as a user, so your teammates may see a different view of the PR, depending on how much of it they’ve already reviewed.
At any time during a pull request, you can also select an arbitrary commit (or range of commits) in the dropdown, allowing you to focus on any part of the PR’s history.
Things to consider
Bitbucket will always default you to “All changes” mode – the incumbent functionality on pull requests up to now – but we think you’ll find iterative review to be useful in many situations. The ability to look at just a slice of a pull request is a powerful feature, and it may take some getting used to. Here are some important considerations when using iterative review:
- When you are looking at a PR in “Changes since last review” mode (or with a custom diff range selected), any comments you make will be associated with that diff range. Other PR viewers will be able to access these comments from the activity feed or by using the comment navigation dropdown.
- We don’t currently support showing “Changes since last review” if a PR has had a merge commit or destructive force push since your last review.
Learn more about pull request review
Get started today
Iterative review is available today for all teams using Bitbucket Cloud. As always, please feel free to share your thoughts with us through the help ‘?’ menu > Give feedback.