Indicate review in progress on reviewer sidebar

Problem to Solve

After you've requested people to review an MR, there exists an interim state between review requested and review complete. This state exists after a user has clicked start a review, but before they've clicked submit review. As an MR author you have no visibility into whether or not the reviewers you've chosen are actively performing the review on your merge request.

Proposal

We should add an additional status to the sidebar that would indicate review in progress. This would give more visibility to MR participants on the overall status of their merge request.

image

State details

  • icon name: status-running
  • color: $blue-500
  • title: Reviewer started review

Related code file: gitlab/app/assets/javascripts/sidebar/components/reviewers/uncollapsed_reviewer_list.vue

Additional Questions/Validation

  1. It's possible (likely?) that the interim state between started review and submitted review is so short that there's not much value here
    • @mle Reviews can be varying in size and time required to review. It could be a few hours to a few days. I have an assumption that the time in between starting and submitting a review would be warrant the need for this intermediate state for better feedback. It helps answer "Has the reviewer seen my review request?" and "Have they started the review?"
  2. Should this trigger notifications to the MR author?
    • @mle No. At this time I don't think we need a notification for this state because as an author you can't do anything with this information because there are no comment visible available at this stage. In the future I would be open to revisit this decision if there is demand for this.
  3. What happens when a reviewer is working to perform their next round, does the state change to review in progress... would that remove any existing outcomes?
    • TO BE ANSWERED. @mle In the current review flow when a review is re-requested, the state of the reviewer goes back to UNREVIEWED so therefore I would assume that once it another trigger that starts a review would move that to REVIEW_STARTED
Edited by Michael Le