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Merge Queues

27 posts · Feb 2013 – Jun 2026

What this trail covers

Bitbucket Cloud's Merge Queues feature automates and sequences pull request merges, validating PRs against the latest target branch state and queued changes before merging to reduce broken builds and merge friction. It supports custom merge strategies and concurrency, integrating with Bitbucket Pipelines for validation. Developers add pull requests to the queue, and Bitbucket handles validation and merging, or ejects failed PRs. This post extends the capability by enabling custom merge checks to be built using Forge and applied at the workspace/project level, offering both required and recommended configurations.

All Atlassian trails
  1. Unlocking efficiency with Merge Queues in Bitbucket Cloud now GAThis post announces the general availability of Bitbucket Cloud's Merge Queues feature. It details the benefits of keeping target branches green, reducing rework, and enabling developers to ship without waiting. The post explains the 'Queue, Validate, Merge or eject' workflow, including the use of merge-queue pipelines for validation. It also outlines pricing, availability, and getting started steps, emphasizing the integration with Bitbucket Pipelines and the configuration of merge strategies and concurrency.
  2. Inside Atlassian’s Merge Queues: How we ship faster with fewer incidentsThis post details Atlassian's adoption of Bitbucket Merge Queues across over 70 large repositories, including Jira, Rovo, and Trello. It quantifies the impact of Merge Queues by showing a reduction in CI reliability failures due to semantic merge issues from 7-10% to nearly zero, and a decrease in internal incidents from 3-5 per week to rare edge cases. It also highlights an increase in developer satisfaction regarding build reliability from 70% to 82%. The post explains the three core functions of Merge Queues: queuing PRs, validating against expected future state, and merging or ejecting. It also provides specific configuration details from the Jira team, including setting build concurrency, merge strategy, and using parent-child pipelines for validation. Failure behaviors such as failed builds ejecting PRs and admin controls for reordering/hot-fixes are also described.
  3. Merge Queues for Bitbucket Cloud, now in open betaThis post announces the open beta of Bitbucket Cloud's Merge Queues for Standard and Premium plans. It details how merge queues automate, sequence, and validate pull request merges to ensure a green, production-ready main branch. Key features include instant queuing of pull requests once checks pass, validation against the latest target branch code plus dependent PRs, and control over prioritization and queue management. The post outlines the benefits of shipping faster, reduced conflicts, and improved team velocity, and provides instructions for getting started by configuring queues in repository settings and defining them in `bitbucket-pipelines.yml`.
  4. Pull request intervention for infrastructure-as-code risks with Bitbucket custom merge checksThis post introduces a new capability for Bitbucket custom merge checks, leveraging the Forge ecosystem and React to intervene on pull requests. It details a four-phase framework for detecting 'Known Risks' in infrastructure-as-code changes, specifically focusing on service descriptors. The framework involves inspecting pull requests for files of interest (e.g., *.sd.yaml), evaluating changes against known risk patterns (e.g., DynamoDB, RDS), reporting detected issues with guidance, and requiring user submission approval with monitoring and rollback criteria. This enhances the existing Merge Queues feature by adding a pre-merge gate for infrastructure-related risks.
  5. Expanding Custom Merge Checks to the Workspace and Project levelThis post introduces the ability to configure custom merge checks at the workspace and project levels in Bitbucket Cloud, extending the existing Merge Queues capability. It details an inheritance model where rules set at higher levels (workspace, project) are applied to lower levels (repositories), reducing redundant configurations and enabling centralized enforcement of policies and compliance. The UI has been redesigned to simplify the management of these checks at scale, allowing for required checks to be enforced at workspace, project, or repository levels, offering granular control and flexibility.
  7. Git, your way: Bitbucket's expanded sync & merge optionsThis post introduces new strategies for syncing and merging branches in Bitbucket Cloud, including a 'rebase sync' option for pull requests that have fallen behind the target branch, and new merge strategies: 'rebase + merge', 'rebase + fast forward', and 'squash (fast forward only)'. It explains how these options allow users to manage Git history according to team preferences and provides details on how to access and configure these features.
  8. What’s new & what's coming to Bitbucket CloudThis post introduces the ability to define custom merge checks and apply them at the workspace level, allowing for centralized management of code quality rules across all projects and repositories. It also highlights the roadmap for enforcing these custom checks, which will fail a merge if the check fails. Additionally, the post mentions AI-generated PR descriptions and AI code review via a ChatGPT pipe, and the upcoming integration with Rovo for unified search and chat. Roadmap items for CI/CD include ARM and multi-arch builds, third-party secret management integration, extended maximum execution times for steps, detailed insights for test optimization, and automated migration tooling from Jenkins.
  9. Scale your code review with custom merge checksThis post introduces the ability to create custom merge checks using Atlassian's Forge platform, allowing for pluggable, business-specific rules to be integrated into the Bitbucket Cloud pull request workflow. It details how these custom checks can be configured as 'Required' or 'Recommended' and announces upcoming support for workspace- and project-level checks to enforce standardization across multiple repositories. This extends the existing Merge Queues capability by providing a framework for more flexible and scalable validation rules.
  10. New in Bitbucket: Focus on recent code changes with iterative reviewIntroduces 'Iterative review' for pull requests, allowing reviewers to focus on changes made since their last review. This feature adds a dropdown to the 'Files changed' tab to select 'All changes' or 'Changes since last review'. Comments made in iterative review mode are associated with the specific diff range. The feature is available for all Bitbucket Cloud users. Limitations are noted for merge commits and destructive force pushes.
  11. Introducing A new Bitbucket pull request experienceIntroduced a new tabular layout for pull requests, moving the activity feed to a prominent 'Overview' tab and creating a dedicated 'Files changed' tab for code review. The activity feed now includes code context for comment threads. The file tree has been moved to the left of the 'Files changed' tab, with an option to collapse it for full-screen code review. The diff view includes familiar options like side-by-side review and hiding whitespace changes, with an option to load files individually for focused review.
  12. New in pull requests: Batched commentsIntroduces a new commenting workflow for pull requests where users can batch comments into a single review. This involves 'Start review' to add pending comments visible only to the user, and 'Finish review' to submit all comments and tasks at once, triggering a single email notification to PR participants. This streamlines communication and reduces the number of individual notifications.
  13. Bitbucket code reviews are faster with improved comment navigationIntroduces a new dropdown at the top of the pull request page that allows users to directly navigate to active and resolved comment threads. Unresolved threads are prioritized, and outdated threads are clearly indicated.
  14. Announcing a Rebuilt Pull Request Create PageThis post announces the rebuilding of the Pull Request (PR) creation experience, aligning its look and feel with the existing PR viewing process. Key improvements include faster page load times (approximately 65% faster on average) due to fetching only essential information upfront, which has the largest impact on large repositories. The description editor, diff, reviewer selector, and commit list have been updated to match the rest of the pull request experience.
  15. Introducing a New Pull Request SidebarIntroduced a redesigned pull request sidebar with tabs for easier navigation between the activity feed and file tree. Separated each event in the Activity Feed for clearer scanning. Slimmed down the file tree design, simplified elements, and introduced guidelines, along with enhanced collapsing/expanding of directories. Released a new 'file list' view for modified files, presenting a flat list instead of a hierarchical directory structure.
  16. Introducing a New Pull Request Status in Bitbucket Cloud: Changes RequestedIntroduced a new 'Changes Requested' reviewer status for pull requests, distinct from 'Approved'. This status allows reviewers to signal that modifications are needed and can be configured to block merges, similar to 'All tasks resolved' merge checks. The UI for displaying PR reviewers has been updated, moving the list to the side column for improved clarity and space.
  17. Automatic Merging When Builds PassThis post introduces the 'Pending Merges' feature in Bitbucket Labs, which enables automatic merging of pull requests once all required builds have passed. It details the user experience for requesting an automatic merge, the notification process for build failures, and how this functionality interacts with existing merge check requirements. Configuration is managed through branch permissions. An update notes the feature's rollout to all users and its transition from beta to default.
  18. Build trust in your deployment workflow with deployment permissionsThis post introduces deployment permissions and branch protection rules to Bitbucket Cloud's workflow. It details how to configure deployment permissions to restrict production deployments to specific users (e.g., repository administrators) and how to enforce branch permissions to ensure that only reviewed and tested code can be merged into the master branch. The post provides examples of `bitbucket-pipelines.yml` configurations and screenshots of the UI for setting up these restrictions.
  19. Take control with branch permissions in Bitbucket CloudThis post introduces and details the configuration of branch permissions in Bitbucket Cloud. It explains how to set up permissions for specific branches or branch types, control write access, merge access via pull requests, and leverage merge checks (approvals, unresolved tasks, passed builds). It also highlights the integration with branching models for automated permission application and the Premium plan features for preventing merges with unresolved checks and resetting approvals on source branch modification.
  20. Deployment Permissions now available in Bitbucket PipelinesIntroduces deployment permissions as a premium feature for Bitbucket Pipelines. This allows for granular control over who can deploy to specific environments and from which branches. Two options are provided: Admin restrictions (only admins can deploy) and Branch restrictions (deployments from invalid branches are paused). This enhances control and protection for deployment environments.
  21. Squash commits when merging a Git branch with BitbucketIntroduced squash merging as a default merge strategy in Bitbucket Cloud for pull requests, allowing users to combine multiple commits from a feature branch into a single commit on the destination branch. This aims to improve repository history clarity, reduce time spent debugging with `git bisect`, and simplify navigation.
  22. Fast-forward merges in Bitbucket Cloud - and by default, if you likeIntroduced the 'fast forward' merge strategy as an available option in Bitbucket Cloud, allowing for linear commit histories without merge commits. Also added a repository-level setting to define a default merge strategy, enabling teams to pre-populate their preferred merge strategy in the pull request merge dialog.
  23. Introducing automatic concurrency control for Bitbucket DeploymentsIntroduces automatic concurrency control for Bitbucket Deployments, ensuring only one deployment is in progress per environment at a time. When a new deployment is triggered while another is ongoing, subsequent deployments are paused and can be manually resumed after the current one completes. This addresses the need for predictable environment status and prevents deployment failures due to unavailable resources.
  24. 4 features in 4 weeks: here's what's new in Bitbucket CloudThis post introduces the ability to revert a merged pull request by creating a new pull request that must go through an approval process. It also details the introduction of a Commit API that allows read and write access to files and directories at any point in the repository history using authenticated HTTP requests, enabling integrations with external services. Additionally, syntax highlighting has been added to code search results to improve scannability, and dependency caching has been added to Bitbucket Pipelines to reduce build times.
  25. New year, new featuresThis post introduces several new features for Bitbucket: Merged pull requests in compare view, Omnibar for keyboard-based navigation and search, URL parameters to ignore whitespace in diffs and set custom tab sizes, and emoji auto-complete with improved high-res emoji rendering (twemoji).
  26. Bitbucket now auto-updates pull requestsIntroduced automatic updates for pull requests: pushing new commits to a branch with an open pull request will now automatically include those commits in the pull request, ensuring reviewers always see the most recent changes.
  27. Pull Requests now with Reviewers and Smarter NotificationsThis post introduces the ability to explicitly add reviewers to pull requests, providing a lightweight approval process. It also enhances notification settings by allowing users to receive emails only for repositories they have write access to and are following, and to start/stop watching individual pull requests. Existing pull requests follow old notification rules, but can now be watched individually.