Product discovery for post-merge review workflows
See &1192
Proposal
There are a few different ways this can be approached and multiple requirements from different customers. We need to investigate from a UX and technical perspective which approach makes sense and how it might behave. This is important because a customer intends to contribute some aspects of it.
Option A: create an empty merge request from the comparison view
This seems to work well in the simple situations where a solo developer has been merging away into master, but then someone needs to do a review and wants the changes to be resolved in a merge request.
Downside is once the review happens, it forces the user into a blocking synchronous workflow.
Benefit is that it is likely simplest to implement.
Option B: long lived merge request with multiple merge events
On the face of it, this seems a more complex approach but seems to better allow organic async flows where merging commits isn't blocked. There are challenges in how to represent merge requests that have been merged multiple times. Seems to dilute the meaning.
Option C: ideas welcome!
Perhaps we make code review a separate from the merge request, or maybe something else again!
Monitoring As part of the MVC, let's not forget to:
- Track usage of adding merged commits to a merge request
- Track creation of empty merge requests
Competition
- Phabricator does it with 2 separate features: https://secure.phabricator.com/book/phabricator/article/reviews_vs_audit/
- Apparently their Audit feature only supports single commit auditing.
- Crucible review workflow. It supports post-commit reviews
- Gerrit review workflow
- How Quora does post-commit reviews