14.0 Create:Code Review retrospective

This is an asynchronous retrospective for the 14.0 release, following the process described in the handbook.

This issue is private (confidential) to the Create:Code Review group, plus anyone else who worked with the group during 14.0, to ensure everyone feels comfortable sharing freely. On 2021-06-26, in preparation for the R&D-wide 14.0 Retrospective, the issue will be opened up to the public, as long as everyone is comfortable with this. You're free to redact any comments that contain information that you'd like to stay private before that date.

Please look at back at your experiences working on this release, ask yourself 🌟 what praise do you have for the group?, 👍 what went well this release?, 👎 what didn’t go well this release?, and 📈 what can we improve going forward?, and honestly describe your thoughts and feelings below.

For each point you want to raise, please create a new discussion with the relevant emoji, so that others can weigh in with their perspectives, and so that we can easily discuss any follow-up action items in-line.

If there is anything you are not comfortable sharing here, please message your manager directly. Note, however, that 'Emotions are not only allowed in retrospectives, they should be encouraged', so we'd love to hear from you here if possible.

Issues we shipped

1. Replace work_in_progress with draft in API
2. Add drafts scope to MergeRequest
3. Investigation: Caching portions of the merge request page
4. ensure /draft quick action and "the button" ("Un/Mark as Draft") will flip draft status
5. Remove support for /wip quick action
6. Allow enabling diff virtual scrolling by browser session
7. Unable to edit MR with unchecked mergeability state
8. Warn users that they should use supported GitLab version
9. MR Review: track changed lines on the diff
10. MR Review: create a new comment on the diff
11. MR Review: Introduce global MR cache
12. "Prevent MR approvals by the author" is ignored unless checked, saved, and unchecked
13. Proposal: Speed up MR Diffs loading and rendering with data caching
14. Cannot find draft MR review comment when returning to page
15. Alert message in MRs “Error occurred while fetching…” appears too often and isn't helpful
16. Resolve conflicts on UserMergeToRef request
17. UpdateMergeRequestsWorker can be expensive and exceed it's execution SLO thresholds
18. Load merge request diffs incrementally from Gitaly
19. More issues - this list only includes deliverables!

Issues that slipped

1. Determine the right file size limit for highlighting files
2. Unable to create multiline comments

• Total deliverables closed: 18
• Total issues closed: 41
• Total MRs merged: 92