Trying out the New Bitbucket Features [Cobalt Matters]

What is Bitbucket?

Bitbucket is a Git code management tool used for software development projects. Recently, new Bitbucket features were released and we wanted to dig deeper and discuss these updates with our team. 

Right now, we use Bitbucket to track the source code for some of our projects, to make changes on our code in a collaborative way and to test and deploy it. We’re always open to new solutions, so we decided to take a look at the new Bitbucket features and see what we can add to our workflow. 

Why new features are important for us?

First of all, we looked into the set of new features and split them up throughout our team to have a closer look. After looking into the new features, we got together to discuss and present them to our entire team so we can all improve our skills and efficiency. 

This is something we do periodically. When we discover something cool that’s worth sharing with the entire team, we get together and organize a [Cobalt Matters] session. This way, we can all share our thoughts on the subjects that matter to us the most. Now that we work remotely, we all set up a call together to see how we can update our dev flow here at Cobalt Sign.

So, below you will find our conclusions after we tested all the features. For each one, we created a demo project that was used as showcase to the team. Then, we discussed the advantages and disadvantages of these features.

What features did we explore?

The structure of an econfig file (see Android Yaml example below) is based on a Docker virtual machine that makes the builds, in our case, the Android SDK.

You can define several steps here. For example, you can set it up to run app tests and see if they pass. If the tests pass then it can be set up to create a build and send a notification on Slack. This tool is more powerful than the one we currently use because you can define multiple types of steps.

We set up the CI to trigger a release build after any push into the master branch. 

The builds are created for each release using the Android build tools, which are in a Docker instance. This way, the gradle command will fetch all the details and cache them to be used in the future. The more details it caches, the more the build time will decrease. This is really helpful.

After a step is completed, you can choose exactly what to download. In our case, we save the build so that we”ll have the APKs ready to download any time in artifacts. This is only a simple step, created for the presentation but steps can be much more complex. For example, builds can be sent to the AppStore or PlayStore to be published.

Moreover, it has a few cool extra features that are worth mentioning. 

Depending on the project’s type, Snyk looks up your dependencies and builds a dependency tree with the imported libraries and their versions and compares them to the flagged versions in its own database of vulnerabilities. Found vulnerabilities are ranked based on the maturity of the exploit and how critically it should be fixed.

In conclusion, Snyc is a tool for scanning the dependencies of a project comparing them against its database to find security vulnerabilities. Once found, programmers can be notified about the issues and offered suggestions or automatic fixes for those vulnerabilities. It can also be integrated as a CI/CD test in a pipeline to stop vulnerable code from getting into production environments.

According to Atlassian “merge checks allow you to recommend or require specific conditions on merges for individual branches or branch patterns. Merge checks work in tandem with branch permissions to give the members of your workspace flexibility and control over your development workflow.” 

This is one of the most useful recent Bitbucket features. Shortly, it means that if you set up the merge checks, then before each pull request is merged Bitbucket will verify if all the requirements are checked and will notify the author about it.

Right now, a repository can have multiple branch permissions for different branches. Branch permission can be set up by type (feature, master, development etc) or by a given pattern/name. 

In the Standard plan, Bitbucket just warns the user about the failed merge checks, but the user can merge the changes, while on the Premium plan users won’t be able to merge if their pull request has unresolved merge checks.

For enhancing our workflow even more, it would be great to be able to set up merge checks for branches of a given pattern/name and apply these for the Sprint{X} branches.

The repository administrators have now the ability to improve the code review experience for large pull requests by excluding files.

Here’s how it works:

These are all the new Bitbucket features we tested and discussed with our team during our latest [Cobalt Matters] session. If you develop apps, you already know how much these features help enhance the development process. 

We were eagerly waiting for some of these features such as build schedule. But others are new, quick & useful improvements that we will welcome in our routines. And while some of the new features from Bitbucket can save a lot of time automating processes, others are efficient because they shorten and simplify our work.

We strongly encourage you to use the new Bitbucket features. They can help you increase productivity and automate parts of your work, with minimal supervision. This way, you will be able to focus on the things that require your attention and develop better projects.