Track multiple TODOs / mentions per item / issue / merge request

Problem to solve

At present, if I'm mentioned in an issue or merge request, I get a TODO notification. This is the primary means through which I organize my work. However, if someone mentions me multiple times on a single issue or MR between work sessions, I only get the notification for the first mention.

Scenarios the solution should support:

• Know when you are being repeatedly tagged (more urgency being generated)
• Know the multiple places where your attention is needed

Intended users

Developers, particularly reviewers

Further details

This is particularly an issue on threaded-discussion issues or MRs, where I might need to respond to 3 or 4 independent points. Particularly on a very large MR, unless I take the trouble to review every discussion, it's easy for me to miss a discussion that is blocked on my input.

Proposal

Ideally, we'd track all mentions. When someone visits a page containing a mention with an outstanding TODO, it would be highlighted in some obvious way. When there are multiple TODOs to address on a single page, it would be great if I could see just those, somehow.

We need to do this in a way that doesn't cause TODO bloat - perhaps grouping them by item and allowing them to be dismissed en per-item would be enough?

Permissions and Security

Nothing new

Documentation

https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/todos.html#multiple-to-do-items-per-object

Current Status

Feature flag

The initial implementation is available behind a feature flag.

multiple_todos - This currently enables the creation of multiple todos while keeping the UI the same. See #28355 (comment 447072597) for more details

To resolve before making this generally available

• Either dedupe todos that happen at the same time from a todoable or combine multiple concurrent todos from the same todoable into a single todo. Examples:
  • Upon todoable creation, user is assigned and mentioned in description.
  • Upon comment on todoable, user is mentioned and a quick action is triggered to assign the same user.
  • Upon pipeline failure, a todo is created. This is noisy if there are lots of failing pipelines on a single todoable.

Next

• Introduce the ability to group todos by todoable object (#282444)
• Improve the UX and resolvability such that each todo can be resolved independently and possibility support the ability to blanket mark all todos as done.
• Provide better visual indicators where your todo exists within todoable.