Does Bitbucket and GitHub have Work In Progress [WIP] pull requests feature?

Question

I know there is a Work In Progress (WIP) merge requests feature on GitLab. I find it very useful when you already want to show the code to your peers and want to prevent 'Accept' button to be pressed. Is there a similar feature on Bitbucket? Tried to use [WIP] prefix on Pull Request name in Bitbucket, but it did not work out.

I am also curious if GitHub has a similar feature too or you still need a plugin for your browser?

Komatik

Related: #15763559 – Chicalote

Answer 1

Bitbucket does not provide WIP PR status yet, but the enhancement is WIP 😊. You can vote here for this feature: https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issues/12503/add-additional-pull-request-states

Unknowing

It is 2020. I used to work with Stash around 4-5 years ago. It's supper disappointing that there are no new features! It seems they focus on selling pretty UI rather than developer productivity. Competition products have much better experience for buck, not to mention free Gerrit. – Vinic

It's November 2021 and yet there is no WIP for PR ! the enhancement still under consideration !! – Iridize

April 2022. No changes ((( – Roselani

Its currently "UNDER CONSIDERATION" which means: We are looking into this suggestion and believe it to be a strong candidate for our roadmap. We will continue investigating and provide a follow-up in a few months time.. 6 years later.... – Stonedeaf

Its 2023 and nothing changed... – Stendhal

It's the top voted request since 2016!! see list here jira.atlassian.com/issues/… – Soften

2024 no updates... it is painfully clear Atlassian is not interested in investing in this product anymore. Thanks goodness my shop is migrating away from bitbucket. How far they have fallen. smh. It's sad because so many people invest their time (myself included) to comment, vote, and collaborate on bitbucket feature requests/issues. I've been watching at least a dozen high value feature requests and there has practically zero interaction from Atlassian for YEARS, regardless of the high volume of interest. – Burack

Answer 2

Since February 2019, GitHub has a "WIP" feature: see "Introducing draft pull requests "

With draft pull requests, you can clearly tag when you’re coding a work in progress.

Now when you open a pull request, a dropdown arrow appears next to the “Create pull request” button.
Toggle the dropdown arrow whenever you want to create a draft instead.

That implies:

A draft pull request is styled differently to clearly indicate that it’s in a draft state.

• Merging is blocked in draft pull requests.
• Change the status to “Ready for review” near the bottom of your pull request to remove the draft state and allow merging according to your project’s settings.
• Also, if you have a CODEOWNERS file in your repository, a draft pull request will suppress notifications to those reviewers until it is marked as ready for review.

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Vanessa Gennarelli describes it in more details with "Ask students to iterate on their work with draft pull requests"

Unlike working privately on a local branch, working on a draft pull request offers Sarah the benefits of GitHub’s features and integrations:

• She can use a task list to keep track of incomplete work.
• She can mention a teaching assistant to get clarification on a requirement or get help on a particularly thorny bug.
• She can even get test results from Travis CI with each new commit.

And yes, you can Re-request review on a pull request (since Feb. 2019)

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Warning: GitLab 13.3 (August 2020) has renamed this feature:

WIP merge requests renamed Draft merge requests

WIP (work in progress) status for merge requests provide a clear signal to reviewers that the merge request in question is not yet ready to be merged.

In order to use a more inclusive and self-explanatory term, the WIP (work in progress) feature for Merge Requests has been renamed to “Draft”.

This term clearly communicates the MR in question is not ready for review as well as not making any assumptions about the progress being made towards it.
Additionally, it reduces the cognitive load for new users, non-English speakers, and anyone not familiar with the WIP acronym.

WIP merge requests are now deprecated in favor of draft merge requests, however both terms will be supported until the next major GitLab release (14.0), after which it will be removed.

See Documentation and Issue.

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With GitLab 13.5 (October 2020), managing Draft is easier:

Mark merge request as 'draft' with a single click

Creating a merge request is a great way to share your contribution with others and get the conversation started, even if the code is not ready to be merged.

In order to signal to others that a contribution is not ready to be reviewed or merged, you can prefix the merge request title with draft (formerly known as wip).
This is useful, however it entails going into edit mode, navigating to the merge request title, and typing the required prefix.

To make it faster to use this feature, we have introduced Mark as draft and Mark as ready buttons directly to the top-right corner of merge request pages (without having to edit its description to change it).
With a single click, you can indicate that your work is in progress and not ready to be merged, and vice-versa.

See Documentation and Issue.

Fly

Answer 3

Now Bitbucket officially provides "Draft" pull requests.

You can choose a "ready" or "draft" (work in progress) version while creating pull request:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/bitbucketserver/draft-pull-requests-1354498120.html

Yellowthroat

Note that this was added in 8.18, released in February 2024: confluence.atlassian.com/bitbucketserver/… – Depressor