Add ability to associate requirements with contextual feature flag -
Problem to solve
Our feature flag list interface is nice, but it may be unclear what a feature flag was just by reading the name. Typically this will be an operations person coming in and looking for a feature flag and wanting to understand what they are looking at.
From the issue side, we can make it clear what the status of the associated feature flag is for that feature.
The combination of these two would make it easy to understand what feature flags are for and what the status of an issue is as it relates to feature flags.
Target audience
- Sidney, Systems Administrator, https://design.gitlab.com/research/personas#persona-sidney
- Product Manager (or others who are setting or need to know the state of feature flags)
Further details
We recently added requirements to GitLab. It would be nice to associate requirements to feature flags to get an end to end understanding of which feature is connected to which requirement and its status (on/off, with which strategy, in which environment) simple from looking at it from the requirements or from the feature flag view.
Proposal
Allow users to be able to map a given feature flag to a requirement that introduced it. This could be linked to from various places where we show the feature flag (issue, mr, epic,requirement), adding important context.
UX Proposal
Associate a feature flag on requirement by mentioning
- Feature flags can be mentioned/linked in the description and comments to add relationship
- Mentions can be made using a link to the feature flag
- References across projects can be made with links and should be displayed with shortened links(ie gitlab-ce^89012)
Requirement screen
- Add a section for related feature flags
- Feature flags can be mentioned/linked in the description and comments to add relationship
- If there are no related feature flags, do not show the component
| Description | Mockup |
|---|---|
| Related feature flag section |  |
| Issue screen |  |
TODOs
-
1 for the widget -
1 for state management (loading the mentions) -
1 for related feature flags box on the issue side -
1 for the table (I think we only need a table for the linking widget - I think mentions may work with the existing db schema, but I'm not 100% sure) -
1 for CRUD operations for the widget -
documentation
What does success look like, and how can we measure that?
Amount of clicks from issue to feature flag and vice vera
Links / references
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