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Control behavior of "Complete linked work items after merging" at completion of PR

Control behavior of "Complete linked work items after merging" at completion of PR

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Jinalkumar Patel
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This is specific to Azure DevOps but it can be apply to anywhere this option is available.

Prior knowledge of Git, Azure DevOps required to understand this issue.

Let's start.

Anyone who has created PR (Pull Request) knows that when PR get approve and it get complete we have an option "Complete linked work items after merging". This is good option but it can be dangerous too if not used properly.

If there are many work item associated with your PR ( this happen if you have linked many work item or recently merged from other branch) and option is marked then it will close all associated work item to close. This is good in few case but problematic in other case when those item is not intended or accidentally close. This is what happen with our team. Most of the time at the completion of PR people take care of it but if is clicked accidentally then it can continue for next PR if not taken care.

I have tried to search for configuration option to disable this but this is not available directly in Azure DevOps as of now. There are following configuration at repository settings. ( Possible solution as of now).

Go to Project Settings -> Repositories -> ( Choose your repositories from right pane) -> Choose "option" from right pane.

Configuration option.png

  1. if this option is "On" , it means that when you check "Complete linked work items after merging" for one PR , it become automatically checked for next PR. This is as per my opinion is bad (personal opinion).

  2. If this option is "Off" then each time you have to decide at the completion of PR that what action is required.

  3. Overall above option is become dangerous when there are too many team member working on repository and also have tendency for "Set auto-complete" true for PR.

My suggestion is that there is one more configuration required to enable and disable this option at repository level so admin can control the things instead of individual team member. I am sure that there may be downside of it and if anyone already aware of it please share.

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