[VSA] Display hints when necessary conditions are missing

Given we are moving to customizable stages, the issue should be changed to notification, similar to x issues do not currently have an MR/commit that links to them. #12196 (closed). Please always include an issue number in your MRs subject line/description section.

------OLD------ We've recently changed our development model to try and take advantage of gitlab's cycle analytics, however we are missing something because although the issues are picked up in the Issue stage, nothing is picked up after. The next stage after Issues is the Plan stage, it is supposed to be triggered when the first commit to the branch is pushed (with a related issue number), but for some reason it isn't being populated.

I understand from reading docs, that in order for data to be pulled into cycle analytics, the following must be met:

  • pipeline must succeed
  • all discussions must be resolved
  • must close an issue
  • issue must be labeled on the issue board
  • issue must be assigned a milestone

In my case, I've met all of these, but there is still something missing, because the further stages aren't populated, and I don't know why. If you would like to take a look and tell me what I'm missing, that would be wonderful (https://0xacab.org/leap/platform/cycle_analytics)!

Proposal

The fact that the above 5 things must be met (and perhaps something else that I'm not seeing), and these things are somewhat buried in the documentation, I felt like a nice feature in gitlab would be for the UI to suggest in cycle analytics what "next steps" you could take to start getting data populated there. Some sort of UI hint, maybe like the one you get when you first login and you are presented with the banner on top suggesting that you can customize your gitlab experience.

For example, the cycle analytics area could suggest things like "there are 10 pending discussions that need to be closed in order for the items to appear in cycle analytics".

"You have pushed 25 commits, but none of them closed issues, reference the issue in the commits to close them: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/issues/automatic_issue_closing.html"

"There are no issues that are assigned milestones, in order to have data appear on cycle analytics, you need to assign issues to milestones"

"There are no issues labeled on the issue board, is the gitlab board (link to project board) to add issue labels to get cycle analytics enabled".

etc. I am sure there are plenty of others that could be added, or the above improved.

Edited by Dan Jensen