Commits that can waive the "requires code review" conditions

Question

In our company, when performing merges between branches in SVN, it's standard practice to include in the commit comments for the merge, the commit comments of all previous revisions being merged at that time.

This of course means that any JIRA issue ids that are in those commit comments of that merge, are once again linked to the Jira issue as a new code commit on that issue.

This is fine and great for tracking until you combine it with a workflow transition condition that no issue may become resolved until all code commits have Crucible reviews performed on them.  Previously reviewed issues must now be rereviewed to resolve issues which were still in the open state.

Is there a flag or smart commit tag that will allow particular commits to SVN to not be recorded by JIRA at all or at least to waive the review requirement?

Dan Feeny · Answer

That's one way of handling it but it is disruptive to normal workflow to have to get a select set of people to make special exceptions for those issues which are affected with this issue.  If there was a "delimiter" or escape code that could be added to commit comments (like the smart commits), it could be added to those merge commits.

We can fall back on this idea if there's no better suggestions.

Jobin Kuruvilla [Adaptavist] · Answer

You can modify the workflow to add an OR condition using which the issues can be resolved even if the review is missing. The OR condition can be something like "users in some special group or role can resolve this issue even if the review is missing".

Will that work?