Dogfood Plan Working Group

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On this page

• Attributes
• Business Goal
• Exit Criteria
• Roles and Responsibilities
• Artifacts

Attributes

Property	Value
Date Created	August 1, 2020
Date Ended	December 15, 2020
Slack	#wg_dogfood_plan (internal only)
Google Doc	Dogfood Plan Working Group Agenda (internal only)

Business Goal

This working group will integrate new Plan stage features in GitLab’s own agile planning process. Additionally, there may be some existing features we can consume. We would start with the Plan stage group itself, asking the people who are responsible for the features to implement their usage locally. Assuming success we might roll this out further across R&D (other stages) in a future iteration. The benefits we hope to achieve are:

• Our current process is not standardized and some teams are probably planning releases in a sub-optimal (not efficiently, transparently, async, etc) because they are not benefitting from what other teams have figured out works well
• Dogfooding
  • If we’re going to standardize on a tool it should be our own product
  • It’ll make the product better for users/customers
• This will reiterate to the team, users, and customers how invested we are in our own planning feature set while GitLab also integrate with other planning tools because they are entrenched in customer organizations

Exit Criteria

• Determine feature within plan that will be used for dogfooding
  • Iterations => Done We selected Iterations in Q and drove it internally in Plan to be used across the quarter
• Finalized Q3 OKR's => Done
  • FY21-Q3 Engineering Division OKRs
  • Development: KR: Project planning & Portfolio management
    • KR: 50% of ~devops::plan ~"type::feature" issues moved to ~"workflow::In Dev" should have an iteration assigned => 86%
    • KR: 50% of the ~devops::plan issues in a single iteration is burned down => 100%
  • UX: KR: Dogfood the Iterations feature in Plan to decrease the time issues spend in workflow::design
  • Quality: KR: Dogfood project planning and project management feature for proactive quality test-planning processes
  • PM: KR: Dogfood iterations
• An epic with issues that are needed to effectively use iterations within the greater GitLab organization => Done
  • Iterations in GitLab
• Define a future target plan feature for dogfooding to introduce to all stages => Done
  • In Q4 we are introducing Epic Swimlanes to all stages and want to see usage in 13 stages until the end of the quarter
• A recorded YouTube demo video suitable for teaching other stages how to modify their processes to use iterations => Will happen as more vital features are added

Roles and Responsibilities

Working Group Role	Person	Title
Facilitator	Tim Zallmann	Director of Engineering
Development Department Lead	Donald Cook	Frontend Engineering Manager
UX Department Lead	Mike Long	Product Design Manager
Quality Department Lead	Ramya Authappan	Quality Engineering Manager
PM Division Lead	Jeremy Watson	Group Manager, PM
Member	Gabe Weaver	Senior Product Manager
Member	Keanon O'Keefe	Senior Product Manager
Member	Mark Wood	Senior Product Manager
Member	John Hope	Backend Engineering Manager
Member	Jake Lear	Backend Engineering Manager
Executive Sponsor	Christopher Lefelhocz	VP of Development

Artifacts

• The plan team and a couple more are actively using Iterations at the moment
• A clear understanding of what works and what doesn't was generated around the feature
• Keeping the dogfooding activity rolling we have agreed to keep a biweekly work meeting while we introduce Epic swimlanes through tutorial videos, office hours and announcements