What is the proper way to communicate with the service teams that comments have been added to APIView

[maririos]

When a service team creates a PR with their swagger definition, the Azure SDK Bot will create the APIView review.
We want the reviews/approvals to happen in APIView, but how can the service name know that there were comments added to the specific APIView?
Is there any subscription/notification that can be added to the creator of the PR? Or assign the creator of the PR as the owner of the APIView review?

[mikekistler]

Could we mirror the comments in the APIView back to the PR?

[JonathanGiles]

Ideally we would be able to subscribe the relevant people to the APIView automatically, and ideally we would have our email system working more reliably than it is now. I would worry that mirroring comments back to the PR will just result in other users responding in the PR rather than in the APIView.

[annelo-msft]

@maririos, following up from our offline discussion in this comment.

Our .NET architect has been leaving APIView comments on PR-generated APIViews and sometimes we have miscommunications because he will think I've seen them and didn't respond (he is very nice about it 🙂) and I won't have because I didn't think to look there and I didn't get a notification.

My initial thought was that it would be nice to get an email notification the same way I do from a comment being posted on a PR, but I understand that others might not want automated notifications to fill up their inboxes, so this may not be the best approach.

In our offline discussion, we explored some of the following ideas:

What if there was a CI job that fails and/or a label added to a PR if APIView comments are added to the PR-generated APIView?

I think this would work, because I couldn't merge the PR until the CI passes (not sure about the label, which if it doesn't block merge, I might miss in my flow), but I might context-switch away from this PR thinking I'm mostly done and then be surprised when there's more work I may not have planned time for when I come back to it if I didn't get a notification.

What if APIView comments were posted back as PR comments on the GH issue?

I like this approach if it is reasonable cost to implement for the following reasons:

• I would get notifications from APIView comments in the same way I would get PR comments; it's part of the same workflow
• It might also be more visible to other readers/followers of the PR that there are APIView comments, since I get the sense that it is primarily PR owners track the CIs pass/failing, but others might want to be part of the APIView comment conversations.

It might be hard to maintain threaded conversations across APIView/PR comments, so a compromise here might be to post a PR comment when a new APIView comment is added, containing a link to the APIView comment, and then close the PR comment when the APIView comment is resolved.

Thanks for thinking about this from the client-development side of the house too, @maririos!