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Content last reviewed on 2022-07-13
Enable teams to effectively plan and execute work in a single application
As GitLab pursues its vision of replacing disparate DevOps toolchains with a single application, the Plan stage aspires to build robust planning tools that tie directly into the broader DevOps lifecycle. Our goal is to empower teams to continuously deliver customer and business value with the shortest possible cycle times.
The Plan Stage provides tools for teams to manage their work. As an end-to-end DevOps platform, GitLab is uniquely positioned to deliver a planning suite that enables business leaders to drive their vision and DevOps teams to deliver value while improving how they work. In addition, the unification of the DevOps process allows GitLab to interlink data across every stage of development, from initial analysis, to planning, implementation, deployment, and monitoring.
The Plan Stage is made up of three groups supporting all major categories needed to plan work for DevOps organizations, including:
The existing team members for the Plan Stage can be found in the links below:
Our vision is to build a Plan experience that aligns with our configuration principles. When you look across the Enterprise Agile Planning tool landscape, you'll find solutions with large customer bases that cover many methodologies and personas. Our competitors have built highly flexible solutions with many configuration options to accommodate the large array of use cases. Unfortunately, this makes these tools non-performant and challenging to administer, leading to customer dissatisfaction.
There are now countless solutions that aim to make planning tools that teams love. For example, tools like Notion, Monday.com, and Asana simplify configuration and focus on user experience. We will follow a similar approach, but our differentiation will be an experience geared toward enabling DevOps organizations to optimize their agile fluency.
As examples, GitLab will provide:
We have strong signals from our customers that they want a planning tool that supports their processes but is not overbearing. Recent conversations include:
As an end-to-end DevOps platform, GitLab is uniquely positioned to deliver a planning suite that enables business leaders to drive their vision and empower their development teams to work efficiently. Our unification of the DevOps process allows us to interlink data across every stage of development, from initial analysis to planning, implementation, deployment, and monitoring. Today, engineering and product managers need to parse through information in multiple systems to know if problems will keep their teams from meeting their plans. The data is often hard to understand, so engineers' days are interrupted with requests for status updates. Executives rely on status reports that are created manually and often inaccurate. To fully solve this problem, DevOps data within Plan should be displayed so that it's easy to understand for users that are not developers.
As examples, GitLab will:
Managing issues across an organization can be a time-consuming and tedious endeavor. It's normal for organizations to have a large number of stale issues that require manual clean-up. Our focus will be to let automation do the lower value work like managing status changes and automating the movement of work items among workstations (queues) so the people doing the work can focus more on creating value and less on remembering the process. At GitLab, we dogfood our issue tracker and have implemented a considerable amount of automation to start down this direction. We should double down on this strategy, incorporate automation into our product and reduce the manual setup required to enable it. GitLab can also provide suggestions and nudges that reduce the number of actions required to complete common tasks.
GitLab recently acquired UnReview which to expand our single platform with machine-learning capabilities and form our new Applied Machine Learning team. The Plan Stage will actively work with the Applied Machine Learning team to improve Workflow Automation within Product Planning and Project Management.
As examples, GitLab will provide:
In three years, the Plan Stage market will:
As a result, in three years, Gitlab will:
Plan offers functionality that ties into workflows in other stages. We are actively collaborating with other stages that are building upon Plan functionality to meet their users needs.
Please explore the individual Category Direction pages for more information on 12 month plans.
GitLab identifies who our DevSecOps application is built for utilizing the following categorization. We list our view of who we will support when in priority order.
Plan, organize, and track team progress using Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, and other Agile methodologies. This category is at the "viable" level of maturity.
Priority: high • Documentation • Direction
Gather insights about how your organization is planning and prioritizing across projects and groups.
Priority: low • Documentation • Direction
Plan upcoming work by creating Epics and mapping all relevant Issues to them. Create and track against multiple milestones at the portfolio level to see status overtime and review progress towards your goals This category is at the "viable" level of maturity.
Priority: high • Learn more • Documentation • Direction
Connect your team using GitLab issues, to external parties directly via email for feedback and support, with no additional tools required. This category is at the "viable" level of maturity.
Priority: low • Learn more • Documentation • Direction
Gather and manage the use cases and requirements to meet business objectives. This category is at the "minimal" level of maturity.
Priority: high • Documentation • Direction
Plan and track testing and quality of your product. This category is at the "minimal" level of maturity.
Priority: low • Documentation • Direction
Upload design assets to GitLab issues for easy collaboration on designs with a single source of truth. This category is at the "viable" level of maturity.
Priority: medium • Documentation • Direction
As a general rule of thumb, features will fall in the Core/Free tier when they meet one or more of the following criteria:
Some examples include:
As a general rule of thumb, features will fall in the Premium tier when they meet one or more of the following criteria:
Some examples include:
As a general rule of thumb, features will fall in the Ultimate tier when they meet one or more of the following criteria:
Some examples include:
An example of what the end result data model and pricing could look like based on these pricing principles:
There are a number of other issues that we've identified as being interesting that we are potentially thinking about, but do not currently have planned by setting a milestone for delivery. Some are good ideas we want to do, but don't yet know when; some we may never get around to, some may be replaced by another idea, and some are just waiting for that right spark of inspiration to turn them into something special.
Remember that at GitLab, everyone can contribute! This is one of our fundamental values and something we truly believe in, so if you have feedback on any of these items you're more than welcome to jump into the discussion. Our vision and product are truly something we build together!
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