Skip to content

Issues (and merge requests) with multiple milestones and respective multiple open/closed states

Problem

  • We want to keep history of issues in milestones, especially when they are not done in a previous milestone and it gets moved over to a new milestone to be completed.
  • When you review the old milestone, you want to see that an issue was not completed and you want to look at metrics and visualizations like burndown charts to see that.
  • Currently we don't have this, so we (GitLabbers, GitLab Engineering specifically) are using workarounds like the missed deliverables system with labels.
  • Our customers are also asking for this.
  • How can we solve this?

Idea

  • I don't like this idea. But let's use this issue to spark conversations and ideas.
  • An issue will be able to support multiple milestones (see https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/5135).
  • So you could have an issue simultaneously open in one milestone, and closed in another milestone.
  • For example, you initially schedule an issue for 11.1. It is not done. So it remains open, with respect to 11.1. Later on, you schedule it again for 11.2 by assigning that milestone. (But you keep the 11.1 milestone on it.) And you finish the issue in 11.2. So now the issue is closed with respect to 11.2, but remains open in 11.1.
  • This solves the problem above, but introduces a lot of complexity in GitLab.