Managing Issues raised in a Merge Request
If a merge request comes into review, rewievers will have comments on them and often point out issues in the code. We currently realize that by adding comments to the questioned lines of code. But as a merge request evolves, very often this gets quite a lot of feedback and overhauls and the merge request overview page gets large and finally it is merged something with oversights of existing issues because nobody has an overview. I felt the pain of that recently a lot.
Our company moved from Reviewboard to GitLab EE, and Reviewboard had a very simple system to avoid this issue which I want to propose to GitLab too.
- When you submit a new comment, at the Bottom there is a little checkbox: Open an Issue.
- If you tick that, the comment will have issue status (highlighted slighty red) and in the diff view there are 2 little buttons: Fixed and Drop
- If you click Fixed, the issue will be folded per default and highlighted slightly green. You can the fold it up manually, if you do so a button appears: Reopen.
- If you click Drop the issue will be folded per default and highlighted slightly grey. You can unfold it to reopen it.
- Gitlab refuses to merge a request which has issues which are still in open stage.
This makes bigger merge request still very manageable. Also it would help if the passing around unfolded issue would be smaller, it wastes a lot of space.