Increase visibility around the package-and-test failures
Part of the work of extending the maintenance policy will open up the stable branches to allow developers to merge bug fixes directly into the stable branches. These branches are part of the core of GitLab releases and it is important to guarantee they are ready to be patched at any point. The package-and-test
pipeline will act as a Quality indicator on merge requests to determine if the bug fixes introduced are compliant from the Quality side.
If the package-and-test
fails, an engineer in test (SET) should review those failures and assess if they're related or unrelated to the merge request. On #2797 (closed), guidance in form of Danger checks was added around the execution of the package-and-test
.
There are several Danger checks around GitLab merge requests, and since it is important to package-and-test
failures are reviewed by a SET, visibility should be increased for those failures.
Proposal: Increase visibility around the package-and-test failures
Visibility around the package-and-test failures can be improved in two ways:
1. Add a reminder after the merge request is approved.
After a maintainer has approved, a discussion can be opened on the merge request highlighting to the maintainer and the MR author that the package-and-test should be green, and any failures should be reviewed by a dedicated SET.
This is a similar strategy used when engineers approved a merge request on the GitLab project:
2. Post a comment on the merge request when the package-and-test
fails
GitLab CI could be adjusted to create a discussion on the merge request when the package-and-test
fails. Same as above, the discussion should state the failures should be reviewed by a SET, and should ping the merge request and the maintainer assigned.