Category Direction - Issue Tracking

Last reviewed: 2020-07-15

📝 Issue Tracking

📝 Issue Tracking


Stage	Plan
Maturity	Complete

Introduction and how you can help

👋 This is the category strategy for Issue Tracking in GitLab; which is part of the Plan stage's Project Management group. Please reach out to the group's Product Manager, Gabe Weaver (E-mail), if you'd like to provide feedback or ask any questions related to this product category.

This strategy is a work in progress and everyone can contribute:

Please comment and contribute in the linked issues and epics on this page. Sharing your feedback directly on GitLab.com is the best way to contribute to our strategy and vision.
Please share feedback directly via email, Twitter, or on a video call.

Overview

Purpose

GitLab's mission is to build software so that everyone can contribute. Issues are the fundamental medium for enabling collaboration on ideas and tracking that idea as it turns into reality.

Essential Intent

The goal of a Category's "Essential Intent" is to provide a concrete, inspirational statement. Another way to think of it is answering this single question – "If Issue Tracking can be truly excellent at only one thing, what would it be?" This is Issue Tracking's Essential Intent:

To provide a single source of truth for an idea from inception to implementation. Members of a community should be able to trust and effectively collaborate on it from anywhere within GitLab without slowing down their current flow.

Next, asking "How will we know when we're done?" provides clarity of purpose. This is how we will know:

Issues take less than 1 second to load and there is never more than a 1 second delay in propogating changes on an issue to any member; Members never interact with an issue that does not contain the most recent changes.
Within 15-30 seconds of first seeing an issue above the fold, any community member can understand the purpose of the idea, that it is up to date and relevant, how it contributes to the wider community's purpose or goals, what the intrinsic value is, where it is in its lifecycle, what the next action is to move the idea forward, who owns that action, and that it sets a reasonable expectation regarding when the idea will be fully implemented that can be trusted with a high level of certainty. Issues that do not satisfy this criteria should not be trusted. Communities never have more than 1% of Issues that are untrusted and no single issue remains untrusted for more than 5 days. We do not rely on humans to determine whether an issue can be trusted or not, but humans are responsible for maintaing trust.
Issues leverage autonomation to empathetically encourage wider community members to improve the quality of the issue, remove many manual processes involved with issue management, and help community members focus on contributing to the top 10% of ideas that will yield 90% of the total value for the beneficiaries of the issue.
New ideas are always welcome from anyone (whether an end user, team member, or internal stakeholder), but they are never duplicated. This helps focus the diverse perspective from the wider community around a singular idea to yield the best possible outcome. We do not rely on humans to prevent duplication.
Issues should be organized in a way that is easily discoverable and accessible to the community the issue serves; but also in a way that optimizes an individual's ability to interact with it based on their personal workflows and how they work best.
Every single change to issues, including the configuration of data properties present on issues such as label and milestone management, are transparent, traceable, auditable, and easily reversible.

How we prioritize

We use the following decision framework when evaluating what to work on. Each idea must meet all three of the minimum criteria and two of the extreme criteria.

	Criteria 1	Criteria 2	Criteria 3
Minimum (3 of 3)	simplifies collaboration	reduces the friction to contributing	aligned with market direction
Extreme (2 of 3)	enhances the ability to build trust	decreases manual effort	increases clarity and purpose

Target Audience

As issues are one of the primary, fundamental mediums for collaborating on ideas within GitLab, every single one of our internal and external personas falls within Issue Tracking's traget audience.

Challenges to address

60% of enterprise software projects have overuns.
The market is littered with fragmented, overly complicated issue tracking and project management tools that are slow, cumbersome, and prioritize enforced workflows over facilitating meaningful collaboration. Most are not organized around how teams actually prefer to plan and track work; and require advanced configuration and numerous integrations with third-party services before they can provide the level of traceability and compliance that enterprises require.
GitLab is also contributing to this problem.
Organizations struggle to quantify the value of their work; leading to prioritization by the "loudest voice in the room" as opposed to business results and customer value.

Where we are Headed

We've written a mock press release describing where we intend to be by 2020-09-01. We will maintain this and update it as we sense and respond to our customers and the wider community.

What's Next & Why

These are the themes we will be working on over the next few releases:

Manage sprint and release cadence
- Outcome: Teams can track work within the timeboxed sprint/release cadence common with popular methodologies such as Scrum and ExtremeProgramming.
- Progress: The MVC for Iterations shipped in 13.2. We'll continue to invest in the roadmap for Iterations.
Track scope change within milestone
- Outcome: Teams are able to track scope changes throughout a milestone and review a milestone summary report that surfaces information such as scope added, scope removed, and issues that missed the milestone.
- Progress: We've had to take the long road of introducing state events for resources in order to accomplish this. The first feature leveraging these new events will be on burnup charts that is on track to be completed in %13.3. From there, we will make improvements to Iteration and Milestone reports to show which issues were completed and missed as well as other items currently on the parent epic.
Team velocity and volatility
- Outcome: Teams are able to set better delivery committments and increase the speed at which they improve processes.
- Progress: Shipping Iterations in 13.2 provides us with the appropriate timebox behavior to provide accurate velocity, volatility, and team capacity feedback. We will be moving forward with this theme in the next few releases.
Issue Task Lists and Tasks
- Outcome: Teams can collaborate on a single issue while still being able to track function specific weights. This is part of the broader vision for capacity management within GitLab.
- Progress: Due to evolving priorities, we had to make a trade-off to delay the implementation of this. It is still an important feature and is on our roadmap once we make progress on the three items above.
Extensible Issues & Issue Types
- Outcome: Issues can have a specific type which also determines other characteristics of the issue such as which fields are shown and what workflows the type of issue should leverage. Ultimately, users can customize issue types based on a library of widgets and custom fields so the data with an issue can be tailored to how organizations want to flow work items through their value streams.
- Progress: We are collaborationg with the Monitor:Health Group to ship the first issue type based on the underling issue capabilities in 13.3 or 13.4. We are also starting on the solution validation for improving issue usability and building the groundwork for standalone widgets that can be selectively consumed by any Issuable (Epics, Issues, Incidents, and Merge Requests). The first widget we are targeting is an enhanced "related" widget that better surfaces the relationship amongst Issuables.
Custom Fields
- Outcome: Teams can track additional meta data on issues without cluttering up the core issue experience.
- Progress: While visible progress on this theme is non-existent, we are currently working on the foundation via extensible issues and issue types to support custom fields down the road.

Our group level issue board provides detailed insight into everything currently in flight.

What is Not Planned Right Now

Integrating machine learning and natural language processing. While this will be important in the coming years, we need to provide a base level of support for modern agile teams before introducing optimizations.
Sub-issues in the traditional sense. Based on our understanding of how they are used in other project management products, we feel like there is a better approach that will require less issue management overhead.

Maturity Plan

This category is currently at the 😁Complete maturity level, and our next maturity target is 😍Lovable by 2020-09-01.

We are tracking our progress against this target via this epic.

User success metrics

We are tracking Monthly Active Users (MAU). Given we only receive usage ping data from 20-30% of instances using GitLab, the reported figures are likely substantially lower than reality.

Why is this important?

Issues are the fundamental medium for enabling collaboration on ideas and tracking that idea as it turns into reality. Over 5 million new issues are created per month and millions are interacted with on a daily basis across all instances of GitLab.

Improving collaboration on issues and how they are tracked directly correlates to a decrease in overall cycle time for a given change within a team's DevOps workflow.

Competitive Landscape

The project management tools market is dominated by Jira (31%), Microsoft (18%), Smartsheet (6%), and Trello (5%). To be competitive, GitLab needs to solve for the following customer comments in the immediate future:

We’ve been told to use gitlab’s milestones to capture agile sprints, as they’re the only thing that can have burn down, they work well with boards and have concepts of time. The default way epics get their start/end dates is based on the milestones of the issues attached though – doesn’t make sense as an issue shouldn’t be assigned to an agile sprint until the sprint is eminent. (root of problem is that gitlab milestone must either be equated to agile milestone or agile sprint, not both – you’re missing a concept)

Needs to be a way to have a team velocity, as a scrum master be able to go through and say “This feature requires ~100 points of work, we can do 25 points per sprint, will take 4 sprints (8 weeks) – you want it done in 6 weeks, will either require to be simplified or increased resourcing.”

Need burn-down chart/progress status of sprints, features, initiatives, and milestones.

During sprint planning, need a way to see what my team’s velocity has been last several sprints to have a good idea of how much we should be planning for upcoming sprint.

Need an easy way to see how much I’m assigning to each team member during sprint planning (team members aren’t interchangeable – sprint can have user stories less than velocity, but if user stories are only doable by one team member then the work can’t get done).

Need to be able to answer questions around “which teams/members are working on this feature?”, “are we still on track to meet this milestone?”, “we want to add this new feature, how will that slow down other development?”, “This team is needed for another project, how will that effect timelines on this project?”, etc…

Analyst Landscape

What they are saying:

Within the next few years, over 2/3 of organisations will adopt a product-centric delivery model and move away from project management practices.
"Agile" adoption remains strong and shows no signs of slowing down.
Successful project/product management solutions must function as part of the overall DevOps toolchain and serve as a hub for planning and measuring value delivery.
Competitive products should also provide feedback in the form of qualitative and quantitative metrics such as customer value and satisfaction, deliver velocity and volatility, business outcomes, cycle times, and organizational effectiveness around adopting modern DevOps and "Agile" practices.

Top Strategy Item(s)

One of our one year goals is to provide first-class support for modern "Agile" methodologies. Here are the next most important items to that end:

Refactor how we handle Milestones. Right now, Milestones are largely stateless so it's impossible to calculate a velocity from Milestone to Milestone as we are retaining very little historical information in Milestones.
Introduce some concept of a team so we can begin to measure and track capacity.
Support multiple milestones per Issue or something similar that enables an issue to be associated to be a release and a sprint.
Improve the integration of reports, milestones, and epics within Boards.

Another goal is to make it easier to collaborate while staying in flow. In order to enable users to interact with Issues from anywhere within the application, we will need to complete some fairly massive refactoring to support soft-real time functionality. These are the next most important steps:

Add support for websockets.
Complete our implementation of GraphQL and refactor the frontend to use GraphQL / Subscriptions.

As GitLab is expanding into larger organizations, we've received feedback that GitLab is not extensible enough to support the growing number of use cases are customers expect Plan to natively support. A long running and large strategic theme that this category is contributing to is making GitLab more flexible to support more diverse use cases. In the near term, we are contributing towards: