Better detailed overview for merge requests
Description including problem, use cases, benefits, and/or goals
In the daily business, we found it very hard to work with merge requests and several approvers. The problem is, if you go to the merge request overview, you just see all merge requests that are open. But there is no additional information about:
- Which MR can be merged (depending on build status and approver status)
- Who has approved and who is missing
- Which MRs i have to approve
Proposal
I just painted a small idea of something how the problem could be solved. In my eyes it is just a gui thing, because all related information is already there (in the MR itself), but not in the overview. Take it as an initial idea. Feel free to modify or improve more. With this simple concept, all questions above are solved.
- You can see, which MR is ready for merge - based on the approval status and the build status
- You can see, who did not approve the MR (from the selected approvers while creating a MR)
- You can see with the new filter all MRs based on the given approver
This view can also be used for the main page "Merge Requests" from the start page. Like the same as for issues, which is great. If you have any questions, let me know.
Activity
Thanks @stefanbauer, these are some great suggestions! My initial reactions:
- I definitely think showing if an MR is approved on the list is an obvious win (I don't think the code for that's very efficient at the moment, though - we might need to take a look if we're displaying that for multiple MRs at the same time).
- The mockup looks nice - I'm concerned it wouldn't work for cases where there are a lot of potential approvers, though.
- This doesn't entirely solve the problem you mentioned, but I'm going to add todos when approval is needed; see https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/42#note_12806408
cc @JobV
Here are my thoughts:
- Instead of showing all approvers may be it is an idea to show something like
2/5- just an indicator, how much people are approvers, and how much did already approve - I think the most important thing is, that there should be a filter, where i can see all MRs, which i still have to approve and which MRs would be ready to merge, because build was green and approvers limit was reached
- Instead of showing all approvers may be it is an idea to show something like
Both of those sound good to me @stefanbauer, I'll leave it to @JobV to schedule this.
mentioned in issue #769
I created #769 for the amount of approvers. I think a status of sorts to show that something is ready to merge is also interesting. Maybe one of our designers could take some of the ideas here and do something with it cc @jschatz1
That said, although I like the look of you mockup @stefanbauer, I think it uses too much space for just the approvals.
I'm not sure about the usefulness of a filter for approvals.
Edited by 🚄 Job van der Voort 🚀The filter has the following background: If you have open more MRs (lets say for instance 100 MRs), then i am only interested in MRs which i have to approve. So i am not interested in seeing MRs where i am not an approver or where i am an approver and i have already approved that MR. This is the idea behind this request. May be there is an another solution how to achieve that. But this is the most annoying thing in our daily work, that i don't get a quick overview about MRs i have still to approve without clicking through each of them.
Edited by username-removed-594475mentioned in issue #868
Mentioned in issue #580
Milestone changed to %Backlog
Mentioned in issue #769
@stefanbauer: Thank you for your feedback and design proposals. There's many important use cases and pain points that you've pointed out. I've included them in the updated description in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/769. Feel free to continue with any discussion there, as I'm closing this issue here.
