Workzone: Order reviewer and merge rules by priority

Workzone: Order reviewer and merge rules by priority

This feature announcement concerns Workzone for Bitbucket Server/Data Center, not Workzone Cloud.

In this November 2022 announcement, we highlighted Workzone’s priority ordering for pull request reviewer, signature-approval and (auto)merge rules in Bitbucket Server/Data Center. This makes it easier to define a specific rule for an important branch while retaining broader rules for other pull requests.

How does rule priority work?

Workzone evaluates the applicable rules from top to bottom against a pull request’s source and destination branches. The first matching rule is selected; lower-priority rules in that list are not combined with it.

To change priority, use the up and down arrows in Workzone’s Project Settings or Repository Settings. The updated ordering is saved automatically.

A simple rule of thumb: put exact branch matches first, wildcard patterns next and the broadest fallback last.

Example: Prioritising release branch reviewers

Consider these three reviewer rules, all targeting main:

1. release/current → main — add team1 and qa-group.
2. release/* → main — add qa-group.
3. any source branch → main — add bot-reviewer.

A pull request from release/current to main matches all three patterns, but rule 1 wins. A PR from release/next to main selects rule 2. A PR from feature/login to main selects rule 3.

The fallback here applies to any source branch targeting main, not every possible destination branch. And the examples represent alternative matching reviewer rules, not three sets of reviewers added together.

The same first-matching-rule approach applies within Workzone’s reviewer, signature-approval and (auto)merge rule lists. Rule priority chooses which configuration matches; actual approval and merge requirements still depend on that rule and the rest of the Workzone/Bitbucket setup.

For the full configuration instructions, see Setting Priority for Reviewers, Signatures & Merge in the maintained Workzone Data Center documentation.

2026 clarification: Workzone is also available for Bitbucket Cloud, but Izymes’ Cloud migration feature comparison lists this particular priority-ordering feature as Data Center-only. Do not assume the same ordering controls exist in Cloud.

Need more control over Bitbucket pull request rules?

If your Data Center team needs branch-specific reviewers, signed approvals and more precise merge conditions, explore Workzone for Bitbucket Data Center on the Atlassian Marketplace to see how these rules fit into a repeatable pull request workflow.

By Sean Manwarring, Head of Marketing at Izymes
Published 1 November 2022 · Updated 26 October 2026