The Bitbucket Cloud (BCLOUD) project is an invaluable source of customer-requested product features, enhancements, and suggestions. As Bitbucket Cloud has continued to grow, we’ve built up quite a backlog! To streamline the process, we recently implemented an in-product form as a replacement for manual issue submission. Entering feedback about Bitbucket Cloud is now easier than ever!
Making it easier to enter your feedback is just the first step. We’re also improving how we review, respond to, and act on that feedback. We now conduct internal reviews on a frequent basis and as a product team we’re committed to doing a better job communicating relative priority and progress. While we can’t promise to implement all requests, we’ll give them the attention they (and you) deserve.
The intake process
To provide product feedback, please continue to use use the Give Feedback option under the help menu. Our support team reviews your feedback and opens a Jira issue in the public BCLOUD project on your behalf. You can upvote them or leave a comment to help us better understand why it is important to you or your workflow. With this new feedback collection process, we now track fewer duplicates, fewer known issues, and fewer suggestions capturing user errors or features working as intended.
Additionally, we have noticed higher quality of suggestion descriptions and details provided. This makes it considerably easier and faster for us to triage, reproduce and move the suggestions within our internal queues and workflows for faster resolution.
The review process
With the higher-quality backlog of incoming issues, we also improved our internal processes to further groom and scrub these issues. Dedicated triage engineers reproduce issues as they come in, adjust their attributes, provide additional triage notes and move the suggestions forward within the internal queues.
Both automated and manual processes have been put in place to scrub out-of-date low-traction suggestions. This keeps the backlog easier to manage. For all the other suggestions, we have an internal review ritual. Here we sort the issues by their votes and review them starting from the top-voted ones.
The ritual always starts by assigning a dedicated owner to suggestions that do not have one yet. This person then takes the responsibility for providing regular updates. Such a ritual keeps everybody up to date and it helps us set realistic expectations with our customers.
Unfortunately, not all top-voted issues can be prioritized. We use our product on a daily basis and we would love to see many of these suggestions implemented, too. But the constraints of the physical world do not yield and we have to make trade-offs. When we make a trade-off, it gets clearly communicated in a comment. Such suggestions are flagged to be reviewed again 6 months later. This choice of cadence keeps our customers updated while not spamming their inboxes.
There is no hard-coded threshold of votes that a suggestion must reach to be prioritized. We evaluate them based on a lot of factors, for example, all prioritized suggestions must be aligned with our long-term business objectives and architectural vision. This means even tickets that do not reach highest number of votes can get prioritized.
Please continue making enhancement requests because they are a valuable source of great improvements in our product. When a suggestion does get prioritized, it is moved to an In progress state and the owner is responsible for providing regular updates until the work is complete. When the work is complete, it is then moved to a Closed state.
Current in-progress suggestions
Several projects are currently in progress addressing high-impact suggestions.
- Signed commits have been prioritized and the progress can be monitored on in this suggestion .
- Shared User Management in Bitbucket Cloud is a huge undertaking and its progress can be monitored in this suggestion.
- Project permissions updates are also in progress, albeit slightly delayed. For most up to date status monitor the progress in this suggestion.
- Another group of suggestions has resulted in a large-scale project to introduce enhanced audit logs into Bitbucket which will be delivered iteratively due to its big scope. You can watch any of the linked suggestions for regular updates.
- Similarly, multi-step deployments, requested in this suggestion, is currently actively in progress and can be monitored for progress in the ticket.
Recently shipped suggestions
With our backlog down to a manageable size, several suggestions were rolled out recently. Our focus was to find issues that can bring value to customers in addition to our roadmap commitments. Not all of these suggestions were top-voted. Sometimes we prioritize suggestions that have simple solutions, low complexity or impact workflows that customers strongly depend on. All feedback from you is important because it helps shape our product.
| Features suggested/voted for by customers | Announcement |
| Support MacOS and Windows builds in Bitbucket Pipelines. | https://bitbucket.org/blog/macos-runners-bitbucket https://bitbucket.org/blog/windows-runners |
| Pull request approvals can now be configured to persist with a more granular sensitivity. | https://bitbucket.org/blog/preserving-pull-request-approvals |
| A repository can now be configured with default pull request tasks which become tasks on each pull request created in that repository. | https://bitbucket.org/blog/default-pull-request-tasks |
| Analyzing the comments of this suggestion to support deleting pull requests we realized many customers did not know how to safely remove sensitive information from their repositories so we published a knowledge-base article clarifying the correct steps. | https://confluence.atlassian.com/bbkb/what-to-do-if-you-ve-committed-sensitive-data-to-a-bitbucket-cloud-repository-1168857188.html |
| As requested in this suggestion, we’ve implemented HTML support in markdown. | Announcement blog coming soon. |
We strive for great level of customer satisfaction. It is our commitment to you to not only address your feedback but also to communicate openly and transparently on the progress.