UX Research - Make state of approval more clear
Although this is not critical, it would be a great convenience for us since less people will be asking me why a license check is required (I've already received ~5 developers asking me this and anticipate more) even though we've communicated this out to the team. It's confusing for many, and would also prevent all the license approvers from getting many items added to their to-do list. Since becoming one of the license approvers, I have thousands of to-do list items over the course of a month, and essentially all of them are related to optional license approvals. It would be helpful if there's some way to filter out or disable those type of to-do items, so that I can more effectively find items that are relevant to me.
I'm only personally impacted by the security and compliance approvals, but it would make sense that if any type of approvals are not known to be required until the pipeline is finished, then it wouldn't show those approvals as required. I'm indifferent as to how the UI should communicate that to the consumer before the pipeline is complete, so long as it doesn't say required.
I can't think of any other type of approvals that fit the above scenario other than compliance approvals, most of our approvals (3 devs + 1 QA) are required regardless of the result of the pipeline.
The above only really applies for when pipelines are required to complete for an MR to be merged (which is true for most of our repos). If not, then I guess the approval should be required.
The above ask would create a way to circumvent the security and compliance approvals, but I am making a backlog item for it in case "soft" approvals are desired.
however I think it may be worth UX investigation into explore if there could be 3 states to make the state better known
- need approval
- don't need approval
- not yet known if an approval needed or not
or heck just to research the current looks and feel and states there of related to License check and possibly by extension vulnerability check and by extension MR approvals states in general which would be a cross-stage effort but i believe the consistency could benefit everyone.