Code review is fundamental to protect the quality of your code, and when the process fails, it can impact the product you deliver to customers – and your bottom line. Bad code costs companies $85 billion annually in lost developer productivity. We built Bitbucket Server & Data Center 7.0 specifically to help address these risks and ensure businesses have the right tools for code review. It’s the first in a series of new investments that will improve developer productivity and further modernize the Bitbucket platform.

Our approach to 7.0 was simple: deliver a product built for the enterprise, while meeting the needs of individual developers. To accomplish that, we set out to build a revamped pull request experience, one that addresses some of the most cumbersome tasks of code review. We also worked to strengthen the power of distributed teams by adding features that improve scale and reliability, wherever teams are located. To get there, we took more than 700 votes from JAC (jira.atlassian.com) and several rounds of customer feedback to ensure that some of your top requests could become a reality. In Bitbucket 7.0, developers (and their teams) have better tools to ship quality code faster.

Improving collaboration

To help reviewers assess changes quickly, we’ve added new features that streamline collaboration and make it easier than ever to spot discrepancies. The first feature in that toolset is syntax highlighting on unified diffs. By using in-line colors to emphasize changes, reviewers spend less time identifying what’s changed and more time validating the design of the code.

Bitbucket 7.0: syntax highlighting on unified diffs

We’ve also added word-wrapping to a unified diff, turning paragraphs of code that were once painful to review into easily digestible text. And whenever you’re ready to add a new task, you can do so without having to create a comment first.

Code review, the agile way

Agile teams use code review not only as a way to protect the quality of their code, but also to cross-pollinate familiarity with the code across the team. Work can’t stop when critical-path developers go on vacation because they’re the only ones that understand the codebase; knowledge should be shared and amplified through processes like code review. And with 7.0, we’ve increased those opportunities by extending the expand context functionality and allowing reviewers to comment anywhere within a pull request. So when an author forgets to make a change further downstream in the code or the reviewer wants to understand the context of new changes, they can do so in an easy, intuitive way.

Finding your way through the clutter

For those of us that strive to simplify our workstreams and find pockets of efficiency wherever they exist, 7.0 includes a number of new features that make work easier to do. From supporting native Ctrl + F search functionality to adding new file-tree filtering, 7.0 saves time and helps developers push code to production faster.

We’ve also added new iconography, with a distinctive design that uses contrasting colors and icons to indicate when a file has been edited, added, removed, or modified.

Time savings to focus on what matters

Beyond adding new features, 7.0 was also focused on improving the speed of tasks across the Bitbucket platform. Moving forward, your teams can expect better performance when switching between diff views and loading new content – in our tests, we saw load times cut by almost 50 percent. We’ve also boosted the algorithms that support user management by up to 20 percent, making it easier for admins to make changes and users to quickly find colleagues. And teams that have Data Center will enjoy even greater performance improvements for geo-distributed teams.

Scale safely, wherever your teams are located

How to scale CI/CD and improve geo-performance in Bitbucket Data Center

Users will also have access to enterprise-grade features like Mirror Farms, CDN support, and OpenID Connect, all included as part of the Data Center instance of Bitbucket 7.0. Mirror Farms are the latest evolution of smart mirroring, built to increase CI/CD capacity. This feature allows users to cluster mirrors into “farms” grouped behind a load balancer to reduce time spent waiting for build results. Teams can point their builds to a single location (the URL of the load balancer) and add additional mirrors to elastically scale.

CDN support speeds up the response time for teams, no matter where they’re located. By distributing static assets in a content delivery network (CDN), teams that are geographically distant from their server location and previously had to wait longer for pages to be fetched or an issue to open are no longer relegated to slower speeds.

Finally, OpenID Content is a new authentication option (in addition to SAML 2.0) that enables seamless and trustworthy integration with third-party identity providers. By extending the range of supported authentication options, customers can more easily achieve single sign-on for end-users across their organizations in a more secure and frictionless environment.

Ready to take it for a spin?

Unlock the power of 7.0 by downloading the new capabilities today:

Still have questions or want to share your experience? Tap into the Bitbucket Community to hear how other teams are using Bitbucket.

Ushering in a new phase of code management and enterprise scale