The #1 Rule for 2025: Stop Self-Merging PRs in Bitbucket

It’s 4:55 PM on a Friday. You’ve just nailed a tricky bug that’s been plaguing the staging environment. The fix is a simple, three-line change. The pull request is open, the pipeline is green, and the weekend is calling your name. You glance at your team’s Slack channel—everyone’s wrapping up. “It’s fine,” you tell yourself. “It’s a tiny change, I know what I’m doing.” You click the one button standing between you and freedom: Merge.

We’ve all been there. The temptation to self-merge a pull request (PR) is immense. It feels efficient, a harmless shortcut in a world of deadlines and endless backlogs. But this seemingly innocent action is one of the most insidious forms of technical debt a team can accumulate. It’s a silent killer of quality, collaboration, and knowledge sharing.

So, as we look ahead, let’s establish a foundational rule for engineering excellence. If you want to make one single change with the highest possible impact on your team’s health and your codebase’s stability, this is it. The #1 rule for 2025 is to stop self-merging pull requests.

What is Self-Merging and Why is it So Tempting?

Let's be clear on the definition. Self-merging is the act of merging your own pull request into a shared branch (like develop or main) without having it reviewed and approved by at least one other team member. It’s you, as the author, giving your own work the final green light to be integrated.

The temptation is rooted in very human, and often valid, feelings:

• Urgency: "This is a critical hotfix and needs to go out NOW!"
• Simplicity: "It's just a typo fix, it doesn't need a review."
• Expertise: "I'm the only one who understands this part of the codebase anyway."
• Convenience: "My team is swamped and I don't want to bother them."

While these reasons feel logical in the moment, they mask a series of significant, long-term risks. Think of it like skipping a final safety check before a launch. It might be fine 99 times, but the one time it isn't, the consequences can be catastrophic.

The Hidden Costs of Flying Solo: 5 Reasons to Stop

Bypassing the review process isn't a victimless crime. The victim is your team's future productivity, the quality of your product, and the collaborative fabric of your engineering culture. Here are the five biggest costs.

1. The Death of Knowledge Sharing

Every PR is a story. It tells the reviewer what changed, why it changed, and how the change was implemented. When you self-merge, you rob your team of that story. Knowledge becomes siloed with you, the author. This drastically increases your team's bus factor. If you're the only one who understands the billing module, what happens when you go on vacation, or worse, leave the company?

Code reviews are the single most effective, continuous, and asynchronous way to cross-pollinate knowledge across a team.

2. Bugs Love to Hide in Plain Sight

It's a well-known psychological phenomenon: we are notoriously bad at spotting our own mistakes. We see what we intended to write, not necessarily what we actually wrote. A simple typo like = instead of == can be invisible to the author who has been staring at the code for hours but glaringly obvious to a fresh pair of eyes.

A reviewer brings a different context, a different perspective, and a mind that isn't fatigued by the problem you just solved. They are your first and best line of defense against preventable bugs making it into your main branch.

3. Inconsistent Code & Architecture Drift

How does your team ensure you're all using the new async/await pattern correctly? How do you enforce that every new service call needs proper error handling and logging? The answer: through code reviews.

PRs are the gatekeepers of your team's coding standards and architectural principles. Without this checkpoint, your codebase will inevitably drift. Different patterns will emerge, styles will diverge, and the overall coherence of the system will degrade. This makes the code harder to read, maintain, and onboard new developers into.

4. Eroding Team Trust and Accountability

When you consistently self-merge, you're sending a subtle but powerful message to your team: "My work doesn't need your input," or "The rules don't apply to me." This undermines the principle of collective code ownership. The code stops being "our code" and becomes a collection of individual contributions.

A mandatory review process fosters a culture of shared responsibility. If a bug makes it to production, it's not just the author's fault; it's a team failure. This shared accountability builds trust and encourages everyone to be more vigilant.

5. Missed Opportunities for Mentorship

Code reviews are a phenomenal teaching tool. They are a direct, in-context channel for senior developers to mentor junior developers on best practices, patterns, and design principles. But it’s a two-way street! Junior developers often bring fresh perspectives and question established norms, pushing senior developers to justify their decisions and sometimes find better solutions.

Self-merging shuts down this vital feedback loop, stunting the growth of every member of the team.

The "But What About..." Scenarios

Even with the best intentions, real-world pressures can make a "no self-merge" rule seem impractical. Let's address the most common objections head-on.

How to Enforce a "No Self-Merge" Policy in Bitbucket

Talking about a policy is great, but enforcing it automatically is better. Thankfully, Bitbucket makes this incredibly easy with Branch Permissions.

Here’s how to set it up and remove the temptation entirely:

1. Navigate to your repository and go to Repository settings.
2. In the left-hand menu, under "Workflow," click on Branch permissions.
3. Click the Add a branch permission button.
4. Under "Branches," select which branch you want to protect. Start with main and develop.
5. Under "Write access," you can leave it as is or restrict it to specific users/groups if needed.
6. The magic happens under Merge checks:
   • Set Minimum approvals to at least 1. We recommend 2 for your main production branch.
   • Crucially, check the box that says: "Prevent a pull request author from approving their own changes." This is the setting that technically prevents self-merging.
   • You can also add other checks, like requiring all tasks to be completed or successful builds.
7. Click Create, and you're done. The merge button will now be disabled on a PR until it has received the required number of approvals from people other than the author.

Beyond the Tool: Cultivating a Culture of Code Review

A tool can enforce a rule, but a healthy culture makes the rule feel natural and beneficial, not burdensome. Enforcing no-self-merging is the first step. The next is to foster a great review culture.

• Keep PRs Small: A PR with 500 changed lines is intimidating and will get a superficial review. A PR with 50 lines will be scrutinized properly. Small, focused PRs are easier to review and safer to merge.
• Write Great Descriptions: Don't just list the files changed. Explain the why. Link to the Jira ticket. Include screenshots or GIFs for UI changes. Give your reviewer the context they need to succeed.
• Review with Empathy: Frame feedback as questions or suggestions, not commands. "What do you think about adding a unit test for this edge case?" is better than "You forgot to add a unit test."
• Be Timely: Respect your teammates' time by reviewing their PRs promptly. Don't leave them blocked. Make reviewing a priority in your daily workflow.

Conclusion: Your Future Self Will Thank You

Stopping self-merges isn't about adding red tape or slowing developers down. It's an investment. It’s an investment in a stable product, a resilient codebase, and a collaborative, learning-oriented team. It's the difference between a group of individual coders and a high-performing engineering team.

So, make this your team's resolution for 2025. Put the guardrails in place in Bitbucket, have the conversation about why it matters, and commit to the process. Six months from now, when you're easily tracking down a change, onboarding a new team member smoothly, or catching a critical bug before it ever hits production, you’ll be glad you did.