Attract and retain happy customers and make customers successful by products of rich features, high quality, fast performance, trustworthy security, and reliable operation.
The development team strives to deliver product requirements fast, resolve customer issues timely, win with open source community jointly, streamline engineering process for efficiency, and enable data-driven operation and enhance transparency through metrics.
The development team is responsible for developing products in the following categories:
The following people are permanent members of the Development Department:
| Person | Role |
|---|---|
| Christopher Lefelhocz | Senior Director of Development |
| Stan Hu | Engineering Fellow |
| Tim Zallmann | Director of Engineering, Dev |
| Chun Du | Director of Engineering, Enablement |
| Dalia Havens | Director of Engineering, Ops |
| Bartek Marnane | Director of Engineering, Growth |
| Tim Z. (Interim) | Director of Engineering, CI/CD |
| Todd Stadelhofer | Director of Engineering, Secure |
| W.H. - Todd Stadelhofer (Interim) | Director of Engineering, Defend |
The following members of other functional teams are our stable counterparts:
| Person | Role |
|---|---|
| Katherine Okpara | UX Researcher, Development |
Welcome to GitLab! We are excited for you to join us. Here are some curated resources to get you started:
Often times, certain issues can be resolved more efficiently through cross functional collaboration. Should such an issue arises, the following lightweight process is followed:
arch review to the issue.Note: once the label is added, the issue will also appear on the development department board to receive appropriate attention.
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.
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 sections and groups match as closely as we can to the DevOps Stages to best map 1:1 to Product Managers.
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
Grooming 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 groom 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.
Grooming will happen on a weekly basis and involve a member of infrastructure, quality, product management, and development.
In cases where infrastructure needs a more general resolution to a problem, an
issue can be opened for "rapid action" (and labeling them rapid action). This is typically around a shared
infrastructure resource that is running towards capacity (as examples Postgres
and Redis). Often in these scenarios we need several teams to dig in and solve
smaller pieces of the problem to reduce load. In this situation, open an issue
with the title "XXXX rapid action", give a description of the general issue you
want to take pressure off of, and label the issue with infra/dev. If you know
the section/groups which need to focus, also include that. An example issue to
this process is the following: Redis Rapid Action.
Note: This process includes both escalating issues to be addressed immediately
as well as deferring issues that are not critical. When an issue is not
critical, it may be removed from the board by removing the rapid action status.
Available email alias (a.k.a. Google group):
Managers, Directors, Sr. Director's teams: each alias includes everyone in the respective organization.
Naming convention:
team@gitlab.com, examples below -
Roll up:
Groups roll up by the org chart hierarchy -
