Adding objectives to a pull request screen

[JohnA]

Let's say that I wanted to move off of Crucible and leverage pull requests as code reviews. Currently, the thing crucible does well is the objectives list of what needs to happen. I don't see any way to add this type of functionality to the stash pull request screen, is it possible?

[cofarrell]

Hi John,

Forgive my unfamiliarity with Crucible, but can the Pull Request description be used as a substitute? On the Stash team we certainly use that as a way to communicate objectives to reviewers. (Did you know the description can also contain markdown for formatting?)

Cheers,

Charles

[JohnA]

Hi Charles,

Thanks for the reply. While description could work, I think there are a few things that objectives have over this.

1. The description by default has the list of commit messages. This makes it really easy to tell what the developer was trying to do. I wouldn't want to turn this off by default.

2. The objectives, with the way you describe it, would then be a burden on the developer. By default, Crucible objectives can be prepopulated based on the project and filled in. We globally apply the objective, and it raises issues when the objectives are modified by the developer.

3. The objectives shouldn't be mixed in with the description. The description is essentially "this is what I changed" but objectives are things we set department wide (were tests updated? were cross module dependencies verified? is this is binary change that needs to be accounted for in other projects?)

After looking in to it a little bit more, I found some plugins that will generate some extra HTML on the pull request screen. For now, we're going to try that out. If it works well we'll probably stick with that. Though it would be nice if this functionality could be ported over from crucible (eventually, we want to retire crucible and our SVN servers in favor of git + stash).

[cofarrell]

Hi John,

Personally I delete the commit messages from description - that's duplicated on the 'commits' tab, and may change as people push updates. Instead I replace it with the background for the work and why it was done. It's obviously a team decision to decide on what they prefer to see there - commits is fine too.

As to generating the objectives from the project - we certainly don't do that yet. That might make a nice plugin, and it sounds like you might have already found a couple (which ones BTW?).

Good luck and let us know if you have any more questions or suggestions. You can also raise feature requests on our public JIRA instance.

Cheers,

Charles