Get Policy Availability in BitBucket Repo to Have a Build (Azure DevOps Build etc.) Validating a Pull Request

 You can setup Build pipelines in BitBucket itself or even Azure DevOps builds to validate an incoming pull request to a stable branch such as master/main. You might want to setup some KPIs to validate availability of such build for PR validation. For such requirements you may have to obtain data from BitBucket API to check if a build validation policy exists for the stable branches in your repos. Let's see how we can get such data from BitBucket APIs.

Set Work Item State on Pull Request Completion

Associated work items help to identify what is completed in a given pull request. If required while completing a pull request you could, set the associated work item to be moved to completed state. With the introduction of new feature, which we are discussing in this post, you would be able to set the work item state (regardless of it is associated work item or not for the pull request) to desired closed, in progress or resolved states based on description specification.

Controlling Pull Request Source Branches for Given Target Branch in Azure Git Repos

Generally you can create pull request from any given source branch to a any given target branch in Azure Git repos. You can setup a pull request validation build which evaluates the repo state, by performing a pre merge in the build server to ensure, your repo build succeeds after the pull request is merged to the target branch. You can set the branch policies so that the pull request cannot be merged to a given target branch if the validation build fails or if the approvers not approve the pull request. However, you might want to follow a branching strategy, which requires you to control from which branches a pull request can be created and merged to a targeting branch. The purpose of controlling the pull request source and target would be to assure your team is adhering to a defined branching and merge strategy. Let’s look at using a task in pull request validation build to ensure the request is coming from an allowed/valid branch, and make the build to fail if it is coming from an invalid branch.

Pull Request Report for Azure Git Repos

When you have several repos in your team project and if you want to obtain a report of pending pull requests, or even completed pull requests, you can use widget available here in your dashboards.Additionally pull request count widget also available in here. Individual repo based pull request dashboard widget also available in Azure DevOps. However, if you want a custom report, you can use REST API and create your own report.

Draft Pull Request in Azure Git Repos

Pull Request are the controlled way to bring in the changes to your stable branches in your Azure Git repos, or for that matter all Git providers support Pull Requests. In Azure DevOps now you can create Pull Request as a draft so that it is giving the ability to developers to getting it ready and prevent it from being completed accidently by the reviewers. Let’s look at simple steps involved in creating Pull Request as a draft in Azure Repos.