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Front End Plan Team

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Frontend Plan Team

The Frontend Plan team works on the frontend part of GitLab for the Plan stage. Among other things, this means working on GitLab's issue tracker, portfolio management features, and Markdown rendering.

For more details about the vision for this area of the product, see the Plan stage page.

Team Members

Person Role
Donald Cook Frontend Engineering Manager, Plan
Fatih Acet Senior Frontend Engineer, Plan
Kushal Pandya Senior Frontend Engineer, Plan & Geo
Winnie Hellmann Senior Frontend Engineer, Plan and Intern Backend Engineer, Plan
Rajat Jain Frontend Engineer, Plan
Scott Stern Frontend Engineer, Plan
Coung Ngo Frontend Engineer, Plan
Florie Guibert Frontend Engineer, Plan

Stable Counterparts

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

Person Role
Felipe Artur Backend Engineer, Plan:Portfolio Management & Plan:Certify
Sean McGivern Engineering Manager, Plan:Project Management
Jarka Košanová Senior Backend Engineer, Plan:Portfolio Management & Plan:Certify
Brett Walker Senior Backend Engineer, Plan:Project Management
Jan Provaznik Senior Backend Engineer, Plan:Portfolio Management & Plan:Certify
Mario de la Ossa Backend Engineer, Plan:Project Management
Patrick Derichs Backend Engineer, Plan:Project Management
Walmyr Lima e Silva Filho Senior Software Engineer in Test, Plan
Heinrich Lee Yu Backend Engineer, Plan:Project Management
Alexandru Croitor Backend Engineer, Plan:Project Management
Charlie Ablett Senior Backend Engineer, Plan:Portfolio Management & Plan:Certify
Eugenia Grieff Backend Engineer, Plan:Project Management
Holly Reynolds Senior Product Designer, Plan
Alexis Ginsberg Senior Product Designer, Plan
Gabe Weaver Senior Product Manager, Plan:Project Management
John Hope Engineering Manager, Plan:Portfolio Management & Plan:Certify
Russell Dickenson Senior Technical Writer, Plan

Hiring chart

This chart shows the progress we're making on hiring. Check out our jobs page for current openings.

Team metrics dashboard

This is intended to track against some of the Development Department KPIs, particularly those around merge request creation and acceptance.

Groups

The Plan stage is split into three groups: Project Management, Portfolio Management and Certify. Due to the current size of the frontend team, we have not explicitly split the team yet. For the sake of planning, frontend engineers have specialities within groups. However, due to shifting workloads per group, frontend engineers on the Plan stage are expected to be able to take on work outside of their speciality.

Project Management Portfolio Management Certify
Fatih Acet Kushal Pandya Kushal Pandya
Winnie Hellmann Rajat Jain Rajat Jain
Scott Stern    
Coung Ngo    

Work

You can see how we work as a stage at the Plan stage page.

Like the backend team, we use the standard GitLab engineering workflow. To get in touch with the Plan frontend team, it's best to create an issue in the relevant project (typically GitLab CE) and add the ~"devops::plan" and ~"frontend" labels, along with any other appropriate labels. Then, feel free to ping the relevant Product Manager and/or Frontend Engineering Manager as listed above.

For more urgent items, feel free to also share the issue in #g_plan on Slack.

Capacity planning

In that we value Velocity over Predictability, we prefer a lightweight system of issue weighting to help with capacity planning. These weights are used for capacity planning and the main focus is on making sure the overall sum of the weights is within 10 of the average of the past three releases.

We encourage anyone to add a weight to an issue if it does not have one. We use a similar scale to the Plan backend engineering team.

Picking something to work on

Groups in the Plan stage each have their own board which they work off of. Since we are still a single team on the frontend, we work off a higher level Plan stage board. The left column of this board is a prioritized list of items scheduled for the current release.

When deciding the next issue to take, frontend engineers should prioritize by the following:

  1. First filter by ~"frontend" and the group label of the speciality of the engineer. Here, items in the ~"workflow::ready for development" column are ready to be picked up. The priority is set top down in the list.
  2. Remove the filter for group speciality label. Again, items in ~"workflow::ready for development" can be picked up.
  3. Items in the ~"workflow::planning breakdown" column. This is a prioritized list of items that may not be fully ready to start development on, but should be close.
  4. Items in the Open column. There should not be a point where there are not issues in the previous steps, but if it happens, feel free to look through the Open column and determine what is needed to move them to a more advanced step.

It's OK to not take the top item if you are not confident you can solve it, but please add a comment in the issue if that's the case, as this probably means the issue should be better specified.

When you pick something to work on, please assign the issue to yourself and add the ~"workflow::In dev" label.

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