Add social functionality to "follow" a user's activity
Problem to solve
As a manager, it is difficult for me to follow what members of my team are doing on a daily basis. My best (maybe only?) option right now would be to subscribe to an RSS feed of their activities, which is apparently unconfigurable (it is simply a dump of all of the user's activity) and requires me to use an RSS reader rather than make use of GitLab's built-in system for notifications and todos.
As someone interested in the ongoing development of GitLab as a product and as a business, I have the same problem - in addition to following some of my team, it would be helpful to follow key contributors to our codebase and/or handbook. In fact, @marin originally pointed this out in Slack as functionality that would help us keep @sytses's changes to the handbook visible without having to post them in a Slack room.
Proposal
Implement a more robust, in-GitLab solution for following the activity of other users. Rather than dump the data to an RSS feed, allow me to select what events I would like to see from different individuals (e.g. when issues are opened, MRs are assigned, comments are created, etc.) and have them show up as notifications in GitLab, just as if I were mentioned or following the work.
What does success look like, and how can we measure that?
As I suspect this will largely be useful for GitLab.com, I think our biggest metric of success would be adoption (in terms of the number of "follows") for our GitLab.com userbase.
Links / references
Other quick notes
- I tried searching for a pre-existing issue for this request, but it's difficult given how often that we use the phrase "follow-up" in addressing technical debt items - so apologies if I missed a relevant issue in my searching.
- I'm assigning this the ~Manage label since I believe this falls under that Dev:Ops stage. @jeremy_ feel free to move it if that's incorrect.