Make review 'follow ups' a first-class concept
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Reviewers sometimes give Merge Request suggestions that are non-blocking. Suggestions that aren't completed by the time the MR is merged are 'follow-ups'. There has been some recent discussion (internal slack channel) about how often follow ups are completed.
Follow-ups that aren't completed are technical debt. They occupy mental space - some maintainers will revisit follow-ups and see if they have been completed. Other follow-ups remain untracked. There is no mechanism for tracking them directly, maintainers would have to keep a list somewhere or sift through previous approvals.
Current functionality
We have the feature to close a MR discussion by creating an issue. But there is no mechanism to track these afterwards or hold MR authors to those.
This issue's suggestion is to take that existing feature and enhance it to make it more useful for tracking follow-ups.
There is a workflow around follow-ups already detailed in our development workflow: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/development/contributing/issue_workflow.html#technical-debt-in-follow-up-issues
Proposal
- Allow the existing close-discussion-with-new-issue action to be batched.
- Similar to how 'apply suggestions' and 'add review comments' can be batched.
- Each separate discussion could be a Task on an overarching issue.
- Automatically add a "Follow up" label to such issues.
- Automatically assign the Merge Request author.
- Automatically add a deadline.
- This causes the follow up to trigger a To Do item when the deadline approaches.
- The duration could be configured in project/group settings.
- Add a personal dashboard that shows assigned follow-ups.
- Similar to the 'assigned MRs' dashboard.
- Uses the 'Follow up' label to create the filter.
- Filterable by state (open/closed/all).
- Add a personal dashboard that shows created follow-ups, for reviewers/maintainers to track progress.
- Filterable by state (open/closed/all).