Teams are important to us at Bitbucket and Atlassian. Fun fact: Even our Atlassian stock ticker is the word TEAM.
Atlassian's mission is to unleash the potential in every team. And at Bitbucket, we want to do our part by ensuring that we are the best place for professional teams to collaborate on code. To date, Bitbucket Cloud has grown to over 12 million registered users and 2 million teams, and ensuring the product is ready to scale as these numbers continue to increase is our top priority. That's why we keep an ear close to the ground to understand what teams need. Lately, we've been seeing that scalability is more important than ever.
Projects are being built differently. We no longer are just dealing with collaborating on a single monolithic repository. In the new world of building modern cloud services, teams don't always have a single repo, but instead they have many repositories (some libraries, some micro services, some front end page apps). With this new way of working, teams need a cohesive way to view and manage development across the entire org.
That's why today we're introducing a new collaborative model called Workspaces. Workspaces provides a single default user experience for how you collaborate across your organization.
Why Workspaces?
In a recent survey, around half of all developers cited lack of visibility into business processes and communication between teams as two of their top challenges in adopting new practices. As organizations shift towards these new frameworks, there's a growing need to break down silos and make it easier to understand who is working on what, why, and when.
Today in Bitbucket, there are several hurdles to visibility across an entire organization. When admins begin working in Bitbucket, they have to choose between building on a user account or a team account. This means admins have to educate themselves about the two account types and consider both current team size and future growth, because while possible, it's not seamless to move from one to the other. With Workspaces, everyone is on one account type (a Workspace) that supports both independent and collaborative work.
Today, it's also hard to see what each individual team member is working on since contributors are often individually added to select repositories. With our new model, everyone is a member of the same Workspace, so visibility is uplifted and you're able to see across the entire organization.
That's why we are unifying our User and Team account model into Workspaces. Workspaces will house all repositories, users, and groups in one centralized space. Workspaces are elastic, growing with your team to be as big as you want, supporting thousands of users, or staying as small as you want, down to a single user. The goal is to allow you to more easily invite others to work together on repositories, monitor and control access to repositories, and manage third-party apps. Ultimately, admins will be given the visibility they need to set clearer frameworks, in turn empowering users to do more independently and ship quality code faster.
What's changing?
We will be slowly rolling out new changes in several phases to build towards this new Workspace model.
The first changes are being introduced over the next few weeks, and these updates will not impact your current repositories, current users, pull requests or any other day-to-day activity. Note that billing will not change with this update and will still be based off account upgrades and number of users who have access to private repositories.
Over the next few weeks, we are adding additional functionality to User accounts and will rename Team accounts to Workspaces.
User accounts will now gain the ability to:
- Add multiple admins
- Create projects to house repos (previously, repos were tied to the owner and not able to be grouped or organized)
With that, we'll also be reorganizing your settings and admin views to align with this new way of working:
- Settings: Your Workspace and Personal settings will now be separate, more clearly defining what is specific to you as a user and what is applicable to your repositories.
- Members: Everyone who has access to your repos in your workspace is now considered a "member" of the Workspace. The new members view will allow you to see every user, or "member" who has access to your repositories.
- Workspaces list: With the Workspaces list view, all users will be able to quickly see all of the Workspaces they belong to regardless of permissions.
What's coming next?
Workspaces paves the way for future improvements that provide greater visibility across your organization's work, more sophisticated permissions and settings, and more efficient project management.
In future stages, this will enable us to do the following:
- Make it easier for teams to manage large sets of repositories, therefore providing greater infrastructure for team growth and easier adoption of new technologies (i.e., microservice application development).
- Deeper integrations with other Atlassian products by working off the same base model of having Groups & Projects.
- Enable Bitbucket for admin hub, allowing admins to manage users across all Atlassian products in one place.
These initial updates will serve as a foundation towards building more flexible and more tightly integrated admin controls between Bitbucket and the rest of the Atlassian suite. Stay tuned for more updates in the coming months.
If you want to learn more about Workspaces or have questions around these updates, drop us a comment in our Community thread.
