In Release 2.3 (2012) draft changes and draft patch set workflow was added to Gerrit. This implementation extended change status with DRAFT value. DRAFT status in change occurs before NEW and will be for a change that is not meant for review (yet). Draft changes and draft patch sets can be removed or published. Publishing a draft patchset in a draft change irreversibly upgrades the change status to NEW. In addition draft changes implied visibility restriction: only change owners and reviewers can see drafts.
In 2013 OpenStack project proposed alternative Work In Progress workflow, that was not adopted in gerrit core at that time. Later, based on his work, work in progress plugin was created. This plugins had some limitation because it wasn‘t a core feature, like set-Ready, set-WIP events were not fired or suppressing mail notifications for WIP changes wasn’t implemented.
In 2017, during migration of Chromium project from Rietveld to Gerrit the WIP workflow got another momentum, as it was a hard requirement for Chromium project migration to Gerrit.
In 2.15 Work In Progress workflow was added to Gerrit core and Draft changes workflow was discontinued.
In this talk we will compare different workflows and possible alternatives and clarify the migration path from older Gerrit versions that may still have draft changes and draft patch sets. We will also look at possible improvements of new WIP workflow.