Use Cases

Definitions

• change message: extra information (text message) that is given by reviewer as a part of their review feedback (when change’s REPLY button is pressed); It may be encouraging or just polite (and as such doesn’t require any further steps from the owner) but very often it is a question, request for an explanation or for the follow up work. Later is often followed by the owner’s reply contributed by the message’s scoped REPLY button. May also be a beginning of the conversation with broader audience (replies from more reviewers).

Primary Use Cases

• user is able to follow multiple change discussions without a need to parse individual entries in Change Log

Secondary Use Cases

• owner/reviewer is able to answer multiple change messages (question or concern) from reviewers in a single round (similar way that DRAFT comments are added to the code)

• both reviewer’s feedback (change message) and owner’s replies (when one selects REPLY in Change Log single message scope) get extended with the unresolved bit (eventually more rules could be added around it). However it will be in reviewers discretion to mark a change message as one that requires resolution (by default, per consistency with inline comments, it does but it might be changed during the implementation or shortly after depending on users feedback).

  Example: reviewer finds that given change has unit tests missing and adds that information as message to the review score marking an extra unresolved bit. Depending on the case change owner either uploads new patch set with unit tests (also replies DONE which marks the thread as resolved) or replies to the reviewer that it will be done as a follow-up change eventually adding (again with message REPLY button) response with the change number that addresses the issue in question (again marking the thread as resolved).

  General purpose change log messages like new new PS creation or robot comments are not a subject of resolution.

Acceptance Criteria

Single change discussion topic with multiple replies is not separated by irrelevant Change Log entries (rebase, etc.).

Background

Change discussion (contributed with REPLY) is currently hard to follow especially when there are multiple replies/topics. Replies are interrupted by messages to different topics, rebases, patch set uploads, etc. It requires an extra effort to parse Change Log entries in order to reason the current state of discussion. What is more it has to be repeated every time when new reply gets added.

In the same time threads are part of file and inline comments…