> Experimental wiki page to track current state of BE / FE work: https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/plan-stage/sdd/-/wikis/_Home/WS-5:-Decision-Log ## Summary The decision log is an entity that capture resolution of questions and threads in a centralized location to allow faster collaboration on Work Items. ## Problem When collaborating in a Work Item that is complex and require lots of alignment, it is often hard to make sure each pending question is captured properly. Not only that, but once a thread is "resolved" with a decision, it need to be added to the work item description which can quite easily spiral out to become too big or unparsable. Once someone who was not involved in the initial discussions is asked to contribute or to move the ball forward on the work item, it is very time consuming to catch up. Additionally, in the era of Agentic, the speed of collaboration has increased and the need for audit trails and transparency into the work of automation has led to a significant need for better tools to surface decisions made, sometimes in conversations between human and agents, to then be visible by _other humans_ and _other agents_. ## Proposed solution The decision log is not a long lived artefact (for v0). Its lifespan is tied to the lifespan of the Work Item and its purpose is to surface questions and decisions that rose during the implementation of its requirements. ## Spec overview 1. The decision log is a widget that exists on all work item types. 2. Decisions can have several states, including: `pending` , `approval requested`, `rejected` `approved`. It is **key** that decisions can be negative. Either in phrasing or as a dedicated status. 3. Decisions can have assignees to them. This should trigger a todo notification to the assignee. This is not blocking _anything_ and serves as a request to formally ask someone to agree or disagree on commitment, which then becomes visible in the Work Item history. 4. Decisions are used when generating a workplan with Duo. Agents should be instructed to read all comments, surface pending questions and answer/resolve questions that have an answer. 5. Decisions should cascade. Decisions made in a child work item should appear in parent work items. That way a root epic can capture all decisions made across. 6. Threads can be linked to decisions and vice versa. You can open a new decision to be made and create a thread from it, or you can resolve an existing thread with a decisions (either pending or a new one). 7. AI gateway needs to support the decision log widget so that agent can act on it. ## Example {width="900" height="545"} ## Open questions - How is the Decision Log stored and displayed on the work item? ## Relationship to other workstreams The decision log will feed into any agent that reads the work item, but its main Agentic uses is to feed into the interactive builder and help create clearer plans of actions. It is also a way to generally facilate and accelerate collaboration with humans and agents by giving clear signal of what is in scope and what isn't. https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/work_items/21511