Create Comments on a Merge Request without opening an "issue" that needs to be resolved
Problem to solve
Sometimes as the author of a Merge Request, it can be helpful to provide context on part of a change to reviewers that would be inappropriate as a comment in the code. This can include a lot of things, from historical context through to links to ephemeral documentation or (in the case of a UI change) a screenshot/video of how a certain change affects behaviour.
Currently on GitLab, that requires opening an "Issue" on the MR that requires "Resolving" or opening a real Issue for before merging. This isn't really accurate for those cases, especially as you may also want those to still be easily visible when going back to an MR in the future.
Intended users
- Delaney (Development Team Lead)
- Presley (Product Designer)
- Sasha (Software Developer)
- Devon (DevOps Engineer)
- Alex (Security Operations Engineer)
- Simone (Software Engineer in Test)
- Allison (Application Ops)
- Priyanka (Platform Engineer)
User experience goal
The user should be able to use GitLab to create a comment on a specific line of a merge request without having it open an issue/be resolved prior to merging.
Proposal
With the GitLab UI as is, I'm not sure of the best way to support this. More buttons becomes kind of clunky, and the current behavior isn't explicit in the exposed controls (as they say "Add Comment"/"Start Review"/"Add to Review" rather than "Open Issue").
For some context of how other tools handle this, ReviewBoard has an Open Issue
checkbox when creating a comment to give this same type of behavior: