When Atlassian originally introduced Bitbucket almost a decade ago, our vision was simple: to create a central place for enterprise teams to design and manage their source code. Since then, we’ve evolved our mission to become the git solution for professional teams, allowing users to be more efficient, innovate faster, and deliver better value to their business. And for teams practicing DevOps, we’ve increased our focus on unifying work across the entire development lifecycle. Bitbucket Server & Data Center 7.4 demonstrates another step in that evolution with the launch of Integrated CI/CD, a seamless way to connect Bitbucket to the leading CI/CD solutions, increasing developer velocity and accelerating time to production.

Integrated CI/CD facilitates a streamlined workflow that’s easy to use and provides contextual feedback at every stage of the software development cycle – without leaving your Bitbucket instance. This means less context switching, fewer manual processes, and more time to focus on code.

Choose your own adventure

We don’t believe in a one-size-fits-all approach for DevOps, so when we built Integrated CI/CD, we wanted teams to have the flexibility to choose the tools they want to use. Whether your team is all in on the Atlassian suite and wants to use Bamboo, or they prefer Jenkins, we make it easy to connect your CI/CD pipeline to Bitbucket in a plug-and-play fashion. Integrated CI/CD also features two new ways to get continuous feedback on your code in Bitbucket: a new Builds page and a new Builds tab on the Pull requests page. By bringing build results right next to your code, we’re giving developers all the right tools to respond to changes without wasting time jumping between applications.

And for teams with the enterprise edition of Bitbucket, Bitbucket Data Center, we offer smart mirroring to minimize interruptions to work and clear the congestion often caused by a backlog of CI builds. Originally created to improve git read and clone performance, smart mirror farms allow teams to cluster mirrors that operate read-only copies of repositories into farms grouped behind a load balancer to increase CI/CD capacity and shorten time to production.

Tip

If you’re interested in learning more about how we built Smart Mirror Farms, check out this blog.

Our mission to streamline the development process and increase developer velocity isn’t limited to Integrated CI/CD. Bitbucket has a number of integrations and partnerships that bring best-of-breed solutions to users.

Do your best work

Teams that practice DevOps release more frequently, with higher quality and stability. And that’s what we’ve seen with our Bitbucket and Jira integration – teams that integrate these solutions release 14 percent more often than those who don’t.

Ushering in a new phase of code management and enterprise scale

This combination allows users to customize branching models, workflow triggers, and Git hooks to create a workflow that works for any team, of any size. Additionally, overhead tasks like transitioning, adding comments to, or creating new issues can be executed without ever having to leave your Bitbucket instance, allowing teams to work wherever they work best. As the source of truth, Jira streamlines the necessary coordination that exists at every stage of the development process, meaning fewer meetings and interruptions to work.

Atlassian also offers a VS Code integration that allows developers the flexibility to choose the environment that works best for them. The Atlassian for VS Code plug-in, which launched for Server and Data Center late last year, combines the power of Jira and Bitbucket to streamline the developer workflow within VS Code. You can create and view issues, start work on issues, create pull requests, do code reviews, start builds, and more. If you’d prefer to stay in Bitbucket, we’ve also introduced a revamped pull request experience in Bitbucket 7.0. The new experience makes it easier to review complex diffs, improves traceability, and cuts load times by up to 50 percent.

Increase collaboration and trust

Building a culture of collaboration and trust is the foundation of every high-performing DevOps team. So to foster communication and offer teams a variety of ways to collaborate:

  • Our Slack integration keeps teammates up to date on everything that’s happening in Bitbucket and reacts to changes
  • Atlassian Community, which offers exclusive AMAs and best practices from SMEs across different companies
  • Confluence, where everyone in the business can share updates, communicate goals, and inspire conversation and new ways of working

To build trust and confidence in the code you push to production, we have partnerships with several DevOps scanning, testing, and analysis tools to power Code Insights. This will show a summary of analysis and code annotations to help identify and address dependency vulnerabilities, code smells, and much more, early in the development process. And for an added layer of protection, we allow teams to enforce merge checks to block pull requests from being merged until their quality reports meet your requirements.

Only the beginning

As we continue to invest in Bitbucket and expand its interactions with other solutions to increase developer velocity, adding new features to Integrated CI/CD will be at the top of our list. In the next few months, we’ll be adding the ability to commit and view config as code, and deployment information to your Bitbucket instance. These features will help automate the path to production and allow developers to ship quality code faster. More to come on this in the rest of the 7.x series. Until then, take phase one of Integrated CI/CD for a spin in Bitbucket Server & Data Center 7.4.

Enhance your DevOps toolchain with Integrated CI/CD