On the heels of our big UI release we decided it was time to let the Bitbucketers sow their wild oats – we call it Innovation Week.
What’s Innovation Week?
We set aside one week for developers to work on whatever they desire – feature enhancements, new features, bug fixes, internal dev-speed, performance improvements, whatever they are interested in. Developers can fly solo or form groups to tackle larger projects. The end goal is to have a shippable feature or improvement by the end of the week.
The results of Innovation Week were awesome with a host of them available on Bitbucket today.
What did we ship?
Real-time pull request status
The Bitbucket team uses pull requests a lot. Over time we have found that several of us may be reviewing a specific pull request at any given moment. This spurned an Innovation Week thought, "It would be cool if we could see who else is looking at the pull request I'm reviewing.” Cue the music, enter real-time status updates.
Now if another developer is working on the same pull request, you are notified in real-time, in browser of any changes that occur. Get notified if a user adds a new comment or if a pull request is approved or updated.
Giving the green light
Bitbucket has a light-weight approval process that allows participants to Approve a commit or pull request – this signifies that a user has reviewed a change and that it LGTM.
Later, when browsing the list of commits or pull requests, Bitbucket displays the total number approvals for a particular change as a gray circle.
A gray badge shows how many reviewers have approved a particular change – now, for those commits or pull requests that you personally have approved, the badge is now green giving you a quick summary of changes that are yet to be reviewed by you.
Identify who you are interacting with
For comments on a commit or a pull request, we've added AUTHOR and REPO OWNER lozenges to call out comments made by the pull request or commit author, or repository owner.
Efficient, relevant search and filtering by programming language
We set out to give the search features of Bitbucket some love – the UI had a makeover and search wanted to get in on the fun.
At the core of our search changes we implemented Postgres's full text searching capabilities. Since implementing the full text search, Bitbucket search queries on average now take less than 50ms and return results based on text relevance across multiple fields increasing relevant results you see.
In addition, we added the ability to filter your search by repository language as well.
The best is yet to come
One more feature came out of innovation week that really knocked our socks off – a collaboration between a front-ender, back-ender and a designer. It really pushed the innovation envelope and it will be shipping to you soon, watch this blog for details.
