In large enterprises, development workflows often involve multiple branches representing different stages such as feature development, release candidates, hotfixes, and production. Each branch may require distinct review processes, approval signatures, and merge controls depending on business rules or compliance needs.

Bitbucket’s native functionality does not support any branch-specific merge checks or merge workflows—only repository-wide configurations are available. Branch-level reviewer settings are flat and do not offer prioritized rule evaluation or branch-specific merge enforcement. This limitation makes it difficult for enterprises to enforce nuanced workflows across overlapping or critical branches.

Workzone’s prioritized rule system empowers enterprises to define multiple branch-matching rules with explicit ordering, where the first matching rule is applied to a pull request. This allows:

• Teams to set highly specific review and merge policies for critical branches like release/current, ensuring key stakeholders such as team1 and QA groups are mandatory reviewers.
• Broader rules to apply to less critical branches, such as assigning only the QA group for all release/* branches except the most specific ones.
• A catch-all fallback rule, for example, assigning an automated bot reviewer for all other pull requests targeting main, reducing manual intervention on trivial changes.