Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

At Atlassian, we use Merge Queues to ship frequent changes with confidence and streamline pull request merges. Across some of our busiest codebases, Merge Queues have sharply reduced incident frequency and turned merging from a stressful bottleneck into a background task. Today, most of our largest repositories rely on Merge Queues—over 70 large repos across products like Jira, Rovo, Trello, and others—having safely landed 30,000 pull requests since adopting Merge Queues Beta last quarter.

Your CI/CD pipeline doesn’t have to live in a YAML file anymore. With on-demand pipelines, you can generate pipeline definitions programmatically, from scripts, services, or automation tools – and execute them instantly via the Pipelines API. No commit. No pull request. No static configuration to modify. Just build the YAML your situation demands and run it.

As part of an initiative to increase the flexibility and power of child pipelines, we are happy to announce that Bitbucket Pipelines will now allow you to share artifacts between parent and child pipelines. This feature extends the use-cases for child pipelines, allowing a greater degree of coordination between parent and child and the use of child-pipelines as modular pieces of processing for larger operations with artifacts. Here’s how it works.

Teams are shipping more code, faster than ever, as they increasingly automate their processes with CI/CD and AI. But high-velocity pull-request workflows and large monorepos, where many PRs are merged continuously, are feeling the pain as they grow: pull requests race to merge before the branch changes again, “green” builds still break due to semantic merge conflicts, and developers are stuck babysitting merges instead of building features.

Bitbucket Pipelines has always been an engine for automating more than just CI/CD, but today, Pipelines takes a first step towards a full agentic automation platform for all the manual, tedious, repetitive work that happens before and after code creation. You’ve probably seen the stat: Development teams spend 84% of their day doing things other than building features. A lot of this work is: This work matters, but it’s not very fun.

Why did your build fail? Ask Rovo, get a clear answer, and even a way to fix it, from anywhere in Bitbucket Pipeline debugging is one of the most common and most painful parts of the development workflow. In our Atlassian research: AI adoption is rising, but friction persists, over 50% of developers reported losing more than 10 hours each week searching for information, onboarding to new code, or toggling between apps.

The Atlassian Rovo Model Context Protocol MCP Server now supports Bitbucket Cloud. AI clients like Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, and VS Code can now browse repositories, create commits, open pull requests, and check pipeline results, all through the same secure MCP connection that already works with Jira and Confluence.

If you’ve ever run a pipeline, you’ve certainly encountered the following situation: The pipeline fails halfway through, and the cleanup script you needed at the end to tear down test infrastructure or archive the logs never gets to run. Until now, there was no built-in way in Bitbucket Pipelines to guarantee that a step always executes at the end of your pipeline, regardless of what happened before it. Today, we’re fixing that.

In December 2025, we announced our intention to introduce pricing for self-hosted runners so we could provide stronger support and keep investing in new features and ongoing improvements. You’ve told us that having a free option is important. As a result, we’re introducing a new operating model that lets you continue using self‑hosted runners for free with the option to upgrade to a paid premium runners tier as your needs grow.

Continuous delivery is only as good as your ability to understand what’s happening inside your pipelines. When a build is slow, flaky, or burning through capacity, you need more than a green/red status and a wall of logs — you need traces. Bitbucket Pipelines now exposes pipeline execution as OpenTelemetry (OTel) traces via webhook events. This lets you stream detailed pipeline spans into your own observability stack and correlate them with the rest of your system. This post walks through.