Definition of Done - Checklist for your pull requests

A bot to make you confirm your Definition of Done (DoD) has been satisfied before a pull request can be merged.

What?

platisd/definition-of-done adds a checklist to your pull request's description, which needs to be ticked off.
The GitHub Action returns a success code only if all of the items in the checklist have been marked as done by a maintainer. This allows projects to remind maintainers and contributors to manually confirm they abide by several criteria, i.e. the "Definition of Done", for the pull request to be considered good to merge.

Why?

In an ideal world, the usefulness, correctness and quality of pull requests would be automatically verified. In practice this does not or cannot happen and we need to manually ensure whether a pull request is in a merge-able state.

The Definition of Done (DoD) is a set of criteria, determined by a project, which needs to be satisfied to consider a task/user story as completed ("done"). In GitHub-based projects, this often boils down to the combination of different conditions that must be true for a pull request to be merged.
While the verification some of these conditions can be automated, e.g. a code review should have taken place, tests should pass, several quality metrics kept above a particular threshold, others cannot.
Conditions that are not easily automated may be technical, e.g.:

• Change tested on scarcely available hardware
• Programming best practices followed

Or criteria related to the process, e.g.:

• Feature approved by stakeholders
• New API is adequately documented

Keep in mind that the Definition of Done is not the same as the acceptance criteria which are functional and non-functional requirements for a specific task. In other words, the Definition of Done is set at a project level and remains stable, while the acceptance criteria are specified on a feature level and are different every time.

If you do not care about the DoD semantics, you can use the action to force maintainers to manually go through a checklist before the pull request can be merged.

How?

The GitHub Action appends the DoD checklist to the pull request description when a pull request is opened. Then every time an item in the checklist is edited, or to be exact the pull request description is edited, it checks whether all of the checklist items have been marked. The GitHub Action will keep failing until all criteria have been checked as satisfied.

The checklist needs to be provided by the Action's user as a yaml file with the following syntax, also found in the sample dod.yaml utilized by this project:

dod:
  - 'Checklist item 1'
  - 'Checklist item 2'
  - 'Checklist item 3'

To create indented (sub)items in the checklist, add the appropriate number of "➡️" characters, as shown below.

dod:
  - 'Checklist item 1'
  - '➡️Checklist item 2'
  - '➡️➡️Checklist item 3'
  - 'Checklist item 4'

The example above, will be published as:

• Checklist item 1
  • Checklist item 2
    • Checklist item 3
• Checklist item 4

Finally, you need to create a workflow similar to the one below (also found in .github/workflows/dod-checker.yml):

name: Definition of Done
on:
  pull_request:
    types: [opened, edited]

jobs:
  check-dod:
    runs-on: ubuntu-20.04
    steps:
      - name: Clone Repo
        uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - name: Check DoD
        uses: platisd/definition-of-done@master
        with:
          dod_yaml: 'dod.yaml'
          github_token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}

Important fields:

• on: You should launch this action when there is a new pull request opened or edited (marking a checklist counts as an edit).
• dod_yaml: You must specify the relative path to the yaml with the checklist you would like to be posted with the syntax described earlier.
• github_token: You must provide the GitHub token for the Action to be able to view and most importantly edit your pull request description.
• (Optional) message_header: You may provide a custom message to be displayed above the checklist instead of the default one found in action.yml.