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.
Person | Role |
---|---|
Donald Cook | Frontend Engineering Manager, Plan |
Kushal Pandya | Senior Frontend Engineer, Plan:Product Planning |
Simon Knox | Senior Frontend Engineer, Plan:Project Management |
Eulyeon K. | Frontend Engineer, Plan:Product Planning |
Rajat Jain | Frontend Engineer, Plan:Product Planning |
Scott Stern | Frontend Engineer, Plan:Project Management |
Coung Ngo | Frontend Engineer, Plan:Project Management |
Florie Guibert | Senior Frontend Engineer, Plan:Product Planning |
In 2020, an Intern will be joining the Plan Frontend Team.
The following members of other functional teams are our stable counterparts:
Person | Role |
---|---|
Gabe Weaver | Senior Product Manager, Plan:Project Management |
Holly Reynolds | Senior Product Designer, Plan:Project Management |
Marcin Sędłak-Jakubowski | Technical Writer, Plan |
Brett Walker | Senior Backend Engineer, Plan:Project Management |
Mario de la Ossa | Backend Engineer, Plan:Project Management |
Heinrich Lee Yu | Senior Backend Engineer, Plan:Project Management |
Alexandru Croitor | Backend Engineer, Plan:Project Management |
Désirée Chevalier | Software Engineer in Test, Plan:Project Management |
Jake Lear | Backend Engineering Manager, Plan:Project Management |
Mike Long | Product Design Manager, Plan & Manage |
Jeremy Watson | Group Manager, Product Management, Manage & Plan |
The Plan stage is split into three groups: Project Management, Portfolio Management and Certify. 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 |
---|---|---|
Simon Knox | Kushal Pandya | Kushal Pandya |
Scott Stern | Rajat Jain | Rajat Jain |
Coung Ngo | Florie Guibert | Florie Guibert |
Axel García | Axel García |
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) 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 #s_plan on Slack.
We use a lightweight system of issue weighting to help with capacity planning, with the knowledge that things take longer than you think. These weights are used for capacity planning and the main focus is on making sure the overall sum of the weights is reasonable.
It's OK if an issue takes longer than the weight indicates. The weights are intended to be used in aggregate, and what takes one person a day might take another person a week, depending on their level of background knowledge about the issue. That's explicitly OK and expected.
These weights we use are:
Weight | Meaning |
---|---|
1 | Trivial, does not need any testing |
2 | Small, needs some testing but nothing involved |
3 | Medium, will take some time and collaboration |
4 | Substantial, will take significant time and collaboration to finish |
5 | Large, will take a major portion of the milestone to finish |
Anything larger than 5 should be broken down if possible.
We're discussing a possible change to the weight scale we use.
We look at recent releases and upcoming availability to determine the weight available for a release.
Estimating bugs is inherently difficult. The majority of the effort in fixing bugs is finding the cause, and then a bug be accurately estimated. Additionally, velocity is used to measure the amount of new product output, and bug fixes are typically fixes on a feature that has been tracked and had a weight attached to it previously.
Because of this, we do not weigh bugs during ~"workflow::planning breakdown". If an engineer picks up a bug and determines that there will be a significant level of effort in fixing it (for example, a large migration is needed, or we need to switch state management to Vuex on the frontend), we then will want to prioritize it against feature deliverables. Ping the product manager with this information so they can determine when the work should be scheduled.
The Plan FE stage works off of two boards, depending on the group: Project Management and Portfolio Management/Certify
When deciding the next issue to take, frontend engineers should prioritize by the following:
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.
Our Code Review Guidelines state that we default to assigning reviews to team members with domain expertise. A domain can be an area of the codebase that a team is responsible for, so frontend engineers within the Plan stage are considered domain experts for Issues, Epics, and all other areas of Plan.
When determining who to assign an MR to, this process should be followed:
Exceptions
As a team, we are working towards using week-long iterations. In agile terminology, this would equate to a week-long sprint. Our week ends during the Plan Stage weekly meeting (Wednesdays), where we will demo the goals that we accomplished during the week.