Issue and Merge Request Workflow Enhancements

Mar 2026Agile planning gets a boost from new features in GitLab 18.10Introduces the unified 'work items' list view, combining epics and issues into a single experience. Introduces 'saved views' for storing customized list configurations (filters, sort order, display options). Renames 'issues' to 'work items' to support future customizability of work item types. This post is a step in the evolution of the Agile planning experience, building on the work items framework.

Feb 2025How we reduced MR review time with Value Stream ManagementThis post details how a GitLab team customized Value Stream Analytics (VSA) to specifically track Merge Request (MR) review time. A new custom stage, 'Review Time to Merge', was created with start and end events defined as 'MR first reviewer assigned' and 'MR merged' respectively. This allowed the team to visualize MR review time on the Total Time Chart and drill down into specific MRs to identify bottlenecks such as delays in reviewer assignment, slow review start times, multiple feedback loops, and idle time post-approval. The post also announces a future VSA enhancement: 'Merge request last approved at' event.

Oct 2024Tutorial: Integrate GitLab Merge Request approvals with external systemsThis post introduces and demonstrates the integration of external systems with GitLab Merge Request approvals using the 'External Status Check' feature. It details the deployment of a sample application that receives status check requests from GitLab, stores them, and provides an interface for external users to approve or reject these requests. The post also outlines the steps for configuring this external status check within GitLab and provides debugging tips for the deployed application.

Jul 2024How visualization improves the GitLab merge train experienceIntroduced merge train visualization for Premium and Ultimate tiers, providing users with a clear view of the merge train queue, including lists of queued and merged MRs. Enabled quick actions such as removing an MR from the train directly from the visualization. This feature aims to improve transparency, trust, efficiency, and collaboration within the merge train process.

Jul 2024Unveiling a new epic experience for improved Agile planningIntroduces a new epic experience built on a unified Work Items framework, ensuring consistency with issues and tasks. Key new features for epics include assignees, health status, time tracking, ancestry view, condensed descriptions, and custom colors. The post also lists planned future enhancements such as templates, custom fields, configurable statuses, project-level epics, cloning, moving epics, and milestones.

Jun 2024First look: The new Agile planning experience in GitLabThis post introduces the 'Work Items' framework as a foundational change to GitLab's Agile planning capabilities, aiming to unify issues and epics into a single, consistent experience. It details the need for this change due to existing inconsistencies between issues and epics (e.g., epics lacking assignees, issues not being supported at the group level). The framework is designed to be flexible, supporting common frameworks like OKRs, and enabling the introduction of new planning object types. Tasks have been introduced as the first implementation of this framework, providing immediate value and feedback. Future enhancements will include custom fields and configurable statuses, along with updates to lists, boards, and roadmaps.

Mar 2024Enhancing GitLab with improved data filtering and visualizationsThis post introduces the 'Improved Data Filtering and Visualization' initiative, which aims to consolidate multiple planning views into a single, configurable experience. It highlights the ability to create complex queries in a user-friendly manner, visualize data in various formats, and provides real-world application examples for product managers and development teams. The initiative focuses on streamlining data interaction and retrieval, enabling nested views of issues and epics, and facilitating easier switching between roadmap and board views.

Feb 2024Unlocking Agile excellence: GitLab Epics for seamless portfolio managementThis post details the advantages of GitLab's multi-level epics for Agile portfolio management. It explains how multi-level epics enable granular work breakdown, flexible compatibility with Agile frameworks, real-time visibility and collaboration through automatic progress updates, and cross-team planning by providing a centralized view of work and dependencies. The post highlights the hierarchical organization of epics up to seven layers deep across groups and projects, and how they tie strategic objectives to tactical deliverables.

Nov 2023Beyond Devs: GitLab Enterprise Agile Planning add-on for all rolesThis post introduces a new Enterprise Agile Planning add-on for GitLab Ultimate subscriptions. This add-on enables non-engineering team members (product managers, designers, marketing, sales) to participate in planning workflows, measure software delivery velocity and impact with Value Stream Analytics, and utilize executive dashboards. It emphasizes scaling Agile planning beyond developers, bringing compliance closer to development through integrated checks, and prioritizing convention over configuration for a simplified user experience. The add-on aims to drive organizational visibility and improve cross-team collaboration by extending the DevSecOps platform to non-technical roles.

Oct 20235 reasons to simplify your agile planning tool configuration with GitLabThis post advocates for a shift away from complex, enforced status workflows in agile planning tools, using GitLab as an example. It highlights how GitLab simplifies agile planning by enforcing statuses closer to the work (e.g., merge request approvals, deployment approvals), leveraging automation (e.g., GitLab triage for labels and health status) to improve data quality, protecting user experience through convention over configuration, simplifying developer tool integration via APIs and webhooks, and reducing time spent on tool configuration. It contrasts this with the limitations of tools like Jira.

Aug 2023How to adopt a cascading merge request strategy with GitLab FlowThis post introduces the 'ucascade' bot and details its deployment on Kubernetes, configuration via a JSON file, and integration with GitLab webhooks. It describes how to set up project access tokens and configure the bot to automatically create cascading merge requests across release branches when a change is merged into a primary branch. This automates a previously manual and time-consuming process for applying fixes to multiple stable branches.

Dec 2022A first look at the new GitLab Web IDE and remote development experienceIntroduces the new GitLab Web IDE beta, rebuilt on VS Code, offering a more powerful and familiar interface for contributing. Key improvements include a flexible interface, drag & drop in the file panel, find and replace, interactive terminal access with remote development capabilities, reduced memory usage, and improved reliability. It also allows users to switch between the new beta and the previous Web IDE. Future plans include VS Code extension support and project-wide search.

May 2022The Future of the GitLab Web IDEThis post announces the decision to replace the current Web IDE with one built on top of VS Code. This involves integrating VS Code core into the GitLab UI, running entirely in the browser, and bundling the GitLab Workflow extension. The goal is to leverage VS Code's extensive features and extension ecosystem to provide a more powerful IDE experience within GitLab. The post also mentions plans to enhance the core editing component to support multi-file editing for simpler workflows.

Mar 2021Why do GitLab designers contribute to the codebase?This post details how designers at GitLab contribute to the codebase by setting up their development environments (GDK, GitPod), migrating UI components (e.g., buttons), and submitting merge requests for UI changes. It highlights the development of shared empathy through direct code interaction, the diversification of skill sets by learning frontend frameworks and contributing code, and the use of merge requests for proposing specific changes. The author also mentions contributing to new features like 'UX reviewer/maintainer to Danger bot' and 'shortcut for collapsible section markdown'.

Feb 202110 tips to make you a productive GitLab userThis post introduces and demonstrates the practical application of GitLab's quick actions and description templates for improving issue and merge request workflows. It details how engineering managers and developers can use quick actions like `/assign`, `/label`, `/milestone`, `/epic`, `/parent_epic`, `/draft`, `/approve`, and `/rebase` to automate common tasks directly within text fields. It also explains how to leverage description templates to pre-populate issues and MRs with quick actions, labels, and assignees, thereby streamlining the contribution process and improving efficiency.

Jan 2021How to do GitLab merge request reviews in VS CodeThis post details the development of the GitLab VS Code extension to integrate merge request review functionality into the editor. It covers the current read-only capabilities (viewing changes and discussions) and outlines future plans for interactive commenting, editing, reactions, and full review creation. The post also mentions the underlying VS Code Extension API and the use of Markdown in comments.

Sep 2020A tale of two file editorsThis post details research into user preferences for the single-file editor versus the Web IDE, revealing distinct use cases for each. It proposes consolidating the 'Edit' and 'Web IDE' buttons into a dropdown menu to allow users to choose their preferred editor, carrying over changes between them. Mockups for this proposed UI change are provided.

Jan 20203 Major improvements coming to GitLab EpicsThis post details three specific improvements to GitLab Epics: 1. The ability to create issues directly from epics, automatically relating them. 2. The display of weighted progress and due dates on roadmap views for better visibility into project tracking. 3. The expansion of epics on roadmaps to show child epic hierarchy, allowing for a more detailed view of work over time.

Jun 2019Issue labels can now be scoped!Introduced Scoped Labels, a feature that allows for mutually exclusive labels within a defined scope. This enables teams to create custom fields and workflow states, automatically removing conflicting labels when a new one is applied. This feature aims to accelerate delivery by preventing label conflicts and providing a basis for measuring work flow through the system.

Apr 2019How we delivered more performant and robust task lists in GitLabThis post details the technical implementation of performance and robustness improvements for GitLab task lists. It describes how the frontend was modified to send only the clicked task's text and line number to the backend, and how the backend verifies this specific task and updates the cached HTML directly using the `SOURCEPOS` flag of the CommonMark renderer and Nokogiri. This approach bypasses full markdown rendering, significantly increasing performance and preventing data overwrites during concurrent user interactions.

Nov 2018Help us shape the future of design discussion in GitLabThis post identifies challenges in design discussions within GitLab issues, specifically the difficulty in following lengthy conversations and managing multiple design iterations. It also highlights the need for version control for design files, currently managed in personal folders outside of the design repository. The post proposes improving design discussion by making design artifacts a first-class citizen, potentially by linking them in the side navigation of an issue and enabling commenting on images that propagate to the sidebar. It also discusses the opportunity for GitLab to engage developers and design teams in the DevOps lifecycle by addressing areas like review and collaboration, interaction design, version control, developer handoff, and design system management.

Oct 2018How to work on two Git branches at the same timeThis post introduces a workflow for working on two Git branches concurrently. It describes using a local development environment for one branch (e.g., for feature development) and the GitLab Web IDE for another branch (e.g., for documentation). This allows developers to commit changes to one branch locally while simultaneously documenting the process in the Web IDE, enabling parallel iteration and feedback on different components of a feature.

Sep 2018GitLab's 2019 product vision for DevOps CreateThis post outlines GitLab's product vision for the 'Create' stage in 2019, focusing on improvements to Git repositories, merge requests, code review, and the Web IDE. Key technical areas discussed include: distributed merge requests for cross-project collaboration, branch comparison and cherry-picking for forks, API for line-by-line code quality feedback in merge requests, smarter merge request diffs, proposing changes via comments, commit-by-commit code review, autosquashing commits, previewing squashed commits, making commit messages part of code review, and enhancing the Web IDE with live previews, web terminals, and integrated code review feedback.

Sep 20184 Examples of MVCs with big resultsIntroduced assignee lists and milestone lists to issue boards for improved team bandwidth monitoring and milestone progress visualization. Redesigned the merge request widget info and pipeline sections for better readability. Added a groups dropdown to the top navigation for easier group switching. Introduced a confidential issue quick action to mark issues as confidential directly from the comment field.

Aug 2018Coming in 11.3: Seamless planning with epics & roadmapThis post introduces the capability for epics to dynamically inherit their start and end dates from the milestones of their associated issues. This allows for a seamless transition from top-down planning (fixed dates on epics) to bottom-up planning (dates derived from issue milestones). The roadmap view will automatically reflect these dynamic dates, providing a unified view of all epics.

Jun 2018Meet the GitLab Web IDEThis post details the development of GitLab's Web IDE, from its initial proof-of-concept as a 'repo editor' to its evolution into a full-fledged Integrated Development Environment. Key technical contributions include the integration of the Monaco editor, the decoupling of the editor from the project sidebar for increased screen real estate, the adoption of a three-pane layout (file explorer, editor, commit panel), and the introduction of distinct editing and review states. The design process focused on guiding users intuitively through the editing-to-committing flow, with a clear hierarchy and a prominent commit button.

Mar 2018How the GitLab UX team uses epicsThis post details how the UX team at GitLab uses epics to plan and track UX efforts. It explains the concept of epics as a collection of user stories or issues that describe a larger user flow or theme. The post outlines a UX strategy template used for epics, including sections for challenges, vision, focus areas, mission, activity/deliverables, and measures of success. It also describes the process of creating the first epic for the merge request page, involving reviewing existing research, identifying pain points, and organizing related issues within the epic. Future enhancements for epics, such as sub-epics, labeling, discussions, project-level epics, and integration with roadmaps, are also mentioned.

Sep 2017How to automatically create a new MR on GitLab with GitLab CIIntroduced a GitLab CI script that automatically creates a Merge Request (MR) for a new branch. The script checks if an open MR already exists for the source branch; if not, it creates one, assigns it to the committer (using GITLAB_USER_ID), sets the target branch to the default branch, and marks the title with 'WIP:'. It also configures the MR to automatically remove the source branch upon merging.

Mar 2016Tutorial: It's all connected in GitLabThis post reinforces the 'issue as a single source of truth' concept and elaborates on the cross-referencing capabilities within GitLab. It details how to reference issues, merge requests, and snippets using specific syntax (`#123`, `!123`, `$123`) within issues, merge requests, and comments. It also explains how commit messages can reference issues and merge requests, and how merging a merge request with 'Closes #ID' or 'Fixes #ID' automatically closes the referenced issue. The post also touches upon the 'Todos' feature for notifications and the use of labels and milestones for organization.

Mar 2016Feature Highlight: TodosThis post introduces the 'Todos' feature, a new mechanism for consolidating notifications related to issues and merge requests. It explains how the feature works, triggered by assignments and @mentions, and how users can interact with their todo list. The post also details the development process, highlighting the reuse of the Activity feed system and the use of ActiveModel::Dirty API for tracking attribute changes, including a custom solution for association changes like labels. It also discusses the naming evolution of the feature from 'Notification System' to 'Todos'.

Feb 2016Making GitLab FasterThis post details performance improvements in GitLab 8.5, specifically addressing two key areas: optimizing the fetching of issues closed by a merge request and improving the performance of retrieving last update times for events. For issue fetching, the approach was changed from iterating through each commit to concatenating all commit messages and the merge request description into a single string for a more efficient database query. This reduced latency from seconds to under 15 milliseconds. For event feeds, the SQL query for retrieving events based on user project access was optimized to improve performance.

Feb 2016Feature Highlight: Create files and directories from the Files pageThis post introduces the ability to create new files, upload files, create directories, create new branches, and create new tags directly from the GitLab UI's file browser. It also highlights the option to start a new merge request when creating a file or directory, enhancing the workflow for quick changes and project management within the interface.

Jan 2016Making GitLab Better for Large Open Source ProjectsThis post addresses major issues raised by the open-source community regarding issue management, specifically focusing on improving issue templates with custom fields and mandatory requirements, enhancing the voting system to replace content-less '+1' comments, and providing better integration with contribution guidelines. It highlights existing and planned features like issue templates, multiple templates, custom fields, and an improved voting mechanism that transforms '+1' into a vote, directly responding to community feedback and demonstrating GitLab's commitment to improving the developer experience for large open-source projects.

Jan 2016Feature Highlight: WIPThis post introduces the 'Work In Progress' (WIP) prefix for merge requests. This feature allows developers to create merge requests for large, complex features early in the development cycle, even after the first commit. This enables continuous code review and CI checks without the risk of accidental merging, promoting an early feedback and collaboration mentality within the development process.

Jul 2015Feature Highlight: Merge Request ApprovalsThis post introduces Merge Request Approvals in GitLab Enterprise Edition, allowing users to enforce a minimum number of required approvals before a merge request can be merged. It details how approvals work, including assigning specific or non-specific approvers, setting default approvers in project settings, and the option to automatically reset approvals after new pushes. It also hints at future improvements like automatic reviewer suggestions.

Jun 2015Feature Highlight: Approve Merge RequestIntroduced Merge Request Approvals in GitLab Enterprise Edition 7.12, allowing users to enforce a workflow requiring multiple reviewers to sign off on a merge request before it can be merged. This adds a crucial step for quality control and team sign-off to the merge request process.

Nov 2014How GitLab Permissions and Protected Branches Keep Your Code SafeThis post introduces GitLab's permission system, defining granular roles (Guest, Reporter, Developer, Maintainer, Owner) to control access to repositories. It also details the implementation of protected branches, which prevent force pushes, deletions, and direct pushes to critical branches, thereby enforcing code review via merge requests and safeguarding code integrity. This directly addresses the need for preventing accidental history rewrites and improving code quality through review.

Sep 2014The 7 Most Important Open Source Workflow Practices for EnterprisesThis post introduces the concept of 'inner-sourcing' for enterprises, detailing how GitLab's features (visibility, forking, pull/merge requests, testing, CI, documentation, issue tracker) enable the adoption of open-source workflow practices within organizations. It specifically mentions the introduction of an 'internal' project visibility level to facilitate this adoption while maintaining code security.

Aug 2014Feature highlight: Git Hooks in GitLab Enterprise EditionThis post introduces Git Hooks in GitLab Enterprise Edition, offering a user-friendly interface for project-specific rules on repository pushes. It highlights the ability to enforce commit message formats (e.g., referencing JIRA issues) and prevent tag deletion, adding a layer of control and consistency to the development workflow.

Jun 2014GitLab Feature Highlight: GroupsThis post introduces the concept of 'Groups' in GitLab, a feature that allows users to organize projects into directories and manage user access to multiple projects at once. It details how to create groups, add projects to them, transfer existing projects into groups, and manage group memberships. This significantly enhances the organizational and access control capabilities within GitLab, complementing existing workflow enhancements.

What this trail covers