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Extend "Start a review" to actions that could signal that the review has started

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Proposal

Extend/repurpose the "Start a review" action to all actions that could inform the assignee of a code review that the reviewer has started a review.

This proposal comes from reconsidering the decision that a "review has started" is at the time of the first comment #457990 (comment 1984446538). The reason for reconsideration is the fact that if there were to be reminders that the reviewer has to take action on a merge request #26353 we wouldn't want the system to nudge the reviewer when in fact they had started.

We want to take actions that could imply that a review has started and making it an explicit action on the reviewer side.

There could be multiple actions that indicate a start of review, so there should be consideration to have activity item when a review is started by a reviewer.

Currently "Start a review" is associated with commenting so we will need to reconsider how that behavior works.

Actions to consider

Curate known actions and explain how we would include it in a "start a review" flow.

  • Gathering context of merge request
    • Read MR description
    • Read related issues
  • Reviewing code
    • Mark file as viewed
    • Checkout code
  • Commenting on changes
    • Start a review
    • Single comment

Actions out of scope

There might be actions on the merge request page that the user could take but may not mean it is starting a review.

  • TBD
Edited by 🤖 GitLab Bot 🤖