2026-02-06: E2E Test Failures Blocking 18.8 Security Release - Merge Request Post-Merge Actions

E2E Test Failures Blocking 18.8 Security Release - Merge Request Post-Merge Actions (Severity 3)

Problem: Persistent failures in the GitLab QA test suite prevented progress on the 18.8-stable-ee security release pipeline.

Impact: Automated QA failures blocked the 18.8 security release pipeline for over 7 hours. No customer deployments or feature flags were blocked, but the release process was delayed.

Causes: Recent UI changes moved the 'Revert' and 'Cherry-pick' buttons into a dropdown, which broke automated tests that expect these actions as visible buttons.

Response strategy: We fast quarantined the affected tests to unblock the release, confirmed the quarantine is effective in the release environment, and are waiting for a full QA run to complete. A separate fix to disable the sidebar feature flag is also in progress.

This ticket was created to track INC-7182, by incident.io 🔥