Issue Tracking¶
When reviewing code or other files, some comments are more critical than others. The reviewer may just have a question or suggest something optional, but they may also have a critical issue that must be resolved before the change can be submitted.
Issue tracking allows reviewers to specify that their comment refers to a defect in the code or file that must be resolved.
The owner of the review request will be able to see that issues were filed, and can resolve or discard them one-by-one. This is a faster alternative to replying to each comment with “Fixed.”
Opening Issues¶
Comment dialogs contain an Open an issue checkbox. Comments with this checkbox checked will be filed as an open issue.
This checkbox is available when reviewing diffs, images, and other kinds of file attachments.
By default, Open an issue is checked for new comments.
The checkbox can also be toggled by pressing Alt-I.
Responding to Issues¶
The owner of the review request will see extra buttons on the issue banners below the comment in the reviews for any issues that are opened. These buttons allow for quickly marking issues as either resolved or discarded.
Fixed will mark that particular issue as fixed.
This lets other reviewers see that you’ve taken care of the issue.
Drop will drop that issue.
This tells reviewers that either their comment didn’t make sense for one reason or another, or that there’s a disagreement about the issue. Generally, this should be followed up with a comment.
Re-open will re-open an issue that was previously closed.
Issues can be closed or re-opened by either the owner of the review request or the reviewer who filed the issue.
Issue Summary Table¶
On the reviews page below the description is a table which lists all of the issues found in reviews.
Clicking the Status drop-down will allow you to choose between:
Open
Dropped
Resolved
All issues
Clicking the From drop-down will allow you to filter the list by individual reviewers.
Clicking on a row will jump to the comment.
Issue Verification¶
If an issue is particularly important, you can enable Issue Verification.
This will prevent owners of a review request from closing an issue until the reviewer (or an administrator) has approved the resolution. Instead, the issue will state it’s waiting for verification.
Issue verification can be enabled by enabling Require Verification when creating a comment.
Because this adds an extra step to the process, we recommend only requiring verification for extremely important issues that should truly block the change. Unless you have specific high requirements for your industry, using it on every issue is likely to slow down the code review process too much.