Enhancement - deployment approvals from Environments dashboard
Proposal
The Deployment Approvals feature creates a very convenient user experience in the Environments view of a project, where someone like a business or product owner can easily see if there are any deployments waiting for approval and, if so, approve or reject them.
The Environments Dashboard is a top-level feature that allows the user to add whatever projects they want, and then see in "one pane of glass" the status of pipelines in those projects.
However, these two features don't play nice with each other: if a project has a pipeline that is held waiting for a deployment approval, the environments dashboard shows it as blocked and does not specify why. Clicking on the blocked indicator goes to the pipeline view, where the deploy job waiting on approval shows as manual. However, it's not possible to start it from here, because it needs approvals. So, you have to click into the environments view in the project and then click approve.
I'm working with a customer who is hoping to move off of Jira. They have users who are business owners on customer-facing webpages, so they have approval authority for deployments in those projects. Currently in Jira, they have a dashboard set up that is a single view of any projects with pending deployments, and they can approve or reject from that dashboard. GitLab is very close to having this functionality as well, but going from the Environments Dashboard to approving a deployment takes quite a few non-obvious clicks.
The Environments Dashboard should clearly show when a pipeline is held waiting for deployment approval, and in that case should either link to the environments dashboard in the project (where a user can open the approval modal) or, probably even better, have a button that directly opens the approval modal.
PM: @nagyv-gitlab