QA Approval in Issues

[Jesse Denardo]

Hello,

I am wondering if there is some kind of workflow that we can use to track issue progression in GitLab (EE 9.1+). We have two teams: Developers and QA. The process we currently follow is this:

1. Issue is created in issue tracker (currently Pivotal Tracker, but we want to switch to GitLab) and assigned to developer.

2. Developer works on the issue and pushes code.

3. (optional) QA can view the review branch created by GitLab in order to test the changes and approve them.

4. Developer submits a MR for their changes, which is linked to the issue in the issue tracker.

5. MR gets reviewed and accepted, and the code gets merged into master.

6. Developer updates the status on the issue indicating that the related work is present on the staging server.

7. QA gets a notification that the developer updated the status on the issue and tests it on the staging server.

8. QA resolves the issue, indicating that it is complete. (Alternatively, QA can reject the issue, indicating to the developer that more work is required.)

The parts that we are having trouble moving to GitLab are steps 6-8. We can't seem to figure out a reliable, unambiguous way for the Developer and QA to communicate with each other about the status of the issue and have this tracked on the issue itself. The best we can figure is to use labels (such as "ready for review" and "qa - approved"), but that doesn't seem to send notifications.

Does anyone have an idea how we could handle tracking issue state? (For reference, Pivotal Tracker has Unstarted / Started / Finished / Delivered / Accepted that can be easily toggled between.)