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Development Department

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Vision

A world class development team of software engineers and managers who make our customers happy when using our product(s). Our products should contain broad rich features, high availaiblity, high quality, fast performance, trustworthy security, and reliable operation.

Mission

The development department strives to deliver MRs fast. MR delivery is a reflection of:

The department also focuses on career development and process to make this a preferred destination for high performing software engineers.

We use data to make decisions. If data doesn't exist we use anecdotal information. If anecdotal information isn't available we use first principles.

The development team is responsible for developing products in the following categories:

Team Members

The following people are permanent members of the Development Department:

Person Role
Christopher "Leif" Lefelhocz VP of Development
Stan Hu Engineering Fellow
Tim Zallmann Director of Engineering, Dev
Chun Du Director of Engineering, Enablement
Sam Goldstein Director of Engineering, Ops
Lily Mai Operations Analyst, Development
Bartek Marnane Director of Engineering, Fulfillment
Todd Stadelhofer Director of Engineering, Secure
Wayne Haber Director of Engineering, Threat Management and Growth

Stable Counterparts

The following members of other functional teams are our stable counterparts:

Person Role
Giuliana Lucchesi People Business Partner, Development and Product (interim)

Team Composition

This is the breakdown of our department by section and by stage.

This is the stack-up of our engineers, by level.

How We Work

Onboarding

Welcome to GitLab! We are excited for you to join us. Here are some curated resources to get you started:

Cross Functional Collaboration

Working across Stages

Issues that impact code in another team's product stage should be approached collaboratively with the relevant Product and Engineering managers prior to work commencing, and reviewed by the engineers responsible for that stage.

We do this to ensure that the team responsible for that area of the code base is aware of the impact of any changes being made and can influence architecture, maintainability, and approach in a way that meets their stage's roadmap.

Architectural Collaboration

At times when cross-functional, or cross-departmental architectural collaboration is needed, the GitLab Architecute Evolution Workflow should be followed.

Development Headcount planning

Development's headcount planning follows the Engineering headcount planning and long term profitability targets. Development headcount is a percentage of overall engineering headcount. For FY20, the headcount size is 271 or ~58% of overall engineering headcount.

We follow normal span of control both for our managers and directors of 4 to 10. Our sub-departments and teams match as closely as we can to the Product Hierarchy to best map 1:1 to Product Managers.

Daily Duties for Engineering Directors

The following is a non exhaustive list of daily duties for engineering directors, while some items are only applicable at certain time, though.

Developing and Tracking OKRs

In general, OKRs flow top-down and align to the company and upper level organization goals.

Managers and Directors

For managers and directors, please refer to a good walk-through example of OKR format for developing team OKRs. Consider stubbing out OKRs early in the last month of the current quarter, and get the OKRs in shape (e.g. fleshing out details and making them SMART) no later than the end of the current quarter.

It is recommended to assess progress weekly.

  1. Append the percentage score to the subject of Objective epics and Key Result issues.
  2. Set the Health status of epics and issues.
  3. In the case where weekly assessment is impractical, an assessment shall be made by the end of each month.

Staff Engineers, Distinguished Engineers, and Fellows

Below are tips for developing individual's OKRs:

  1. Align OKRs to team goals. However, it's unnecessary to derive from all organizational OKRs. Simply decide what makes sense to your personal situation.
  2. Follow the same timeline of managers and directors, i.e. stubbing out early and bring OKRs in shape by the end of the current quarter.
  3. Refer to the same walk-through example of OKR format.
  4. Make SMART OKRs - Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound.
  5. Follow the same progress assessment instructions above.

Examples

  1. Engineering
  2. Development

Ownership of Shared Services and Components

The GitLab application is built on top of many shared services and components, such as PostgreSQL database, Redis, Sidekiq, Prometheus and so on. These services are tightly woven into each feature's rails code base. Very often, there is need to identify the DRI when demand arises, be it feature request, incident escalation, technical debt, or bug fixes. Below is a guide to help people quickly locate the best parties who may assist on the subject matter.

Ownership Models

There are a few available models to choose from so that the flexibility is maximized to streamline what works best for a specific shared service and component.

  1. Centralized with Specific Team
    1. A single group owns the backlog of a specific shared service including new feature requests, bug fixes, and technical debt. There may or may not be a counterpart Product Manager.
    2. The single group is a specific team, meaning there is an engineering manager and all domain owner individuals reside in this team. The DRI is the engineering manager.
    3. This single group is expected to collaborate closely and regularly in grooming and planning backlog.
    4. This model may require consensus from the Product Management counterpart.
    5. This model may fit a subject domain that experiences active development.
  2. Centralized with Virtual Team
    1. A single group owns the backlog of a specific shared service including new feature requests, bug fixes, and technical debt. There may or may not be a counterpart Product Manager.
    2. The single group is a virtual team, meaning it consists of engineers from various engineering teams, for example maintainers or subject matter experts. Typically there isn't an engineering manager for this virtual team. The DRI is an appointed person in the group who may not necessarily be an engineering manager.
    3. This single group is expected to collaborate closely and regularly in grooming and planning backlog.
    4. This model may fit a subject domain that's in maintenance mode.
  3. Collectives
    1. Collectives consist of individuals from existing teams who voluntarily rally around a shared interest or responsibility, but unlike Working Groups may exist in perpetuity. The shared interest could be a specific technology or system. Collective members feel a collective responsiblity to weakly own, improve upon or otherwise steer the subject they govern.
    2. This is a weaker form of the Virtual Team but introduces more structure than a fully decentralized model. It can be appropriate when some form of ownership is desirable where the subject has cross-cutting impact and wide reach and cannot clearly be allocated to any specific team.
    3. Collectives do not have product or engineering managers, they are fully self-governed.
    4. Members of the Collective sync regularly and keep each other informed about the shared interest. Problem areas are identified and formalized in the Collective, but are not logged into a Collective backlog. Instead a DRI is assigned who should put the task forward to the team with the greatest need for the problem to be resolved. This is to ensure that work is distributed fairly and that there are no two backlogs that compete with each other for priorities.
    5. Collectives work best when they consist of a diverse set of individuals from different areas of product and engineering. They double as knowledge sharing hubs where information is exchanged from across teams in the Collective first, and then carried back by the individuals to their specific teams.
  4. Decentralized
    1. The team who implements specific functions or utilizes certain features of the shared services is responsible for their changes from local development environment to production deployment to continued maintenance post-deployment. There is not a development-wide single DRI who owns a portion or the entirety of a shared service.
    2. A specialty team may exist for specific subject domains, however their role is to enable scalability, availability, and performance by building a solid foundation and great tools for testing and troubleshooting for other engineering teams, while they are not responsible for gating every single change in the subject domain.

Shared Services and Components

The shared services and components below are extracted from the GitLab product documentation.

Service or Component Sub-Component Ownership Model DRI (Centralized Only) Ownership Group (Centralized Only) Additional Notes
Alertmanager          
Certmanager          
Consul          
Container Registry          
Email - Inbound          
Email - Outbound          
GitLab K8S Agent          
GitLab Pages          
GitLab Rails          
GitLab Shell          
HAproxy          
Jaeger          
LFS          
Load Balancer          
Logrotate          
Mattermost          
MinIO          
NFS          
NGINX          
Object Storage          
Patroni          
PgBouncer          
PostgreSQL          
Prometheus          
Puma          
Redis          
Sentry          
Sidekiq          
Workhorse          

Learning Resources

Secure coding best practices

It is important that all developers are aware of secure coding best practices and refresh this knowledge periodically. This is tracked via Secure Coding Training Guidelines.

Ruby on Rails Performance Training

The materials from an earlier Ruby on Rails performance workshop can be found on internally shared Google drive.

Video Sessions

Day Topics Video Links
Session - Day 1 Intro and overview Monday Wednesday
Session - Day 2 Tools Monday Wednesday
Session - Day 3 SQL and N+1 Troubleshooting Monday Wednesday
Session - Day 4 Queueing Theory Monday Wednesday

Database

Here is the information of a PostgreSQL query optimization bot at GitLab - Joe: Blueprint and Design.

Frontend

Frontend Masters

Frontend Masters allows you to advance your skills with in-depth, modern frontend engineering courses.

GitLab has an account with Frontend Masters and team members can gain access to it by creating an Access Request and select the best option for your situation (single user, bulk user, etc.) and, once approved by your manager, assign to the Access Request Provisioner listed in the Tech Stack for this system. Once your access has been provisioned, you will receive an email to activate your account.

You can also join the #frontendmasters Slack channel for course recommendations and discussion.

GraphQL

We use GraphQL alongside our REST API at GitLab and are increasingly adding new features to the GraphQL API over time.

The GraphQL API can be added to by anyone, including community members. We have a group of self-selected team members who are willing to help with any GraphQL questions you may have. You can get in touch with them by mentioning @gitlab-org/graphql-experts in any GitLab issue or merge request.

You can read more information about GraphQL at GitLab here:

We also run GraphQL office hours, which is a place where GitLab team members can ask questions and chat amongst peers about GraphQL at GitLab.

These meetings are currently run on a weekly cadence, alternating between timezones.

Time in UTC Organisers
+4:30 @ntepluhina
+16:30 @seanarnold, @cablett

Continuous Delivery, Infrastructure and Quality Collaboration

In late June 2019, we moved from a monthly release cadence to a more continuous delivery model. This has led to us changing from issues being concentrated during the deployment to a more constant flow. With the adoption of continuous delivery, there is an organizational mismatch in cadence between changes that are regularly introduced in the environment and the monthly development cadence.

To reduce this, infrastructure and quality will engage development via Availability & Performance Refinement which represents critical issues to be addressed in development from infrastructure and quality. Issues on this board are tagged with gitlab.com and infradev labels. A director from development will be assigned to refine the board, work with product/infrastructure/quality to set priority/severity of issues, make sure they are assigned and worked, and escalate where necessary for resolution.

Refinement will happen on a weekly basis and involve a member of infrastructure, quality, product management, and development.

Rapid Action Issue

Rapid Action, as the name implies, is the process we use when a critical situation arises needing immediate attention from various stakeholders. When the situation is identified as a potential Rapid Action the following guidance is recommended.

It is recommended that daily progress is updated in the agenda. Once the exit criteria has been met, remove the rapid action label, close the rapid action issue and prepend the agenda document with "Closed" or "Deprecated" to indicate its status.

Email alias and roll-up

  1. Available email alias (a.k.a. Google group):

    Managers, Directors, VP's teams: each alias includes everyone in the respective organization.

  2. Naming convention:

    team@gitlab.com, examples below -

    • Managers: configure-be@gitlab.com includes all the engineers reporting to the Configure backend engineering manager.
    • Directors: ops-section@gitlab.com includes all the engineers and managers reporting to the director of engineering, Ops.
    • VP of Development: development@gitlab.com includes all engineers, managers, and directors reporting to the VP of Development.

  3. Roll up:

    Teams roll up by the org chart hierarchy -

    • Engineering managers' aliases are included in respective Sub-department aliases
    • Sub-department aliases are included in Development alias

Development Escalation Process

Books

Note: books in this section can be expensed.

Interested in reading this as part of a group? We occassionally self-organize book clubs around these books and those listed on our Leadership page.

  1. The Principles of Product Development Flow
  2. Software Engineering at Google
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