Plan teams:
The responsibilities of this collective team are described by the Plan stage. Among other things, this means working on GitLab's functionality around issues, issue boards, milestones, to-do list, issue lists and filtering, roadmaps, time tracking, requirements management, and notifications.
In GitLab issues, questions should start by @ mentioning the Product Manager for the corresponding Plan stage group. GitLab team-members can also use #s_plan.
For UX questions, @ mention the Product Designers on the Plan stage; Nick Leonard for Plan:Project Management, Alexis Ginsberg for Plan:Product Planning, Dan Mizzi-Harris for Plan:Certify and Blair Christopher for Plan:Optimize.
We work in a continuous Kanban manner while still aligning with Milestones and GitLab's Product Development Flow.
When we're planning capacity for a future release, we consider the following:
The first item gives us a comparison to our maximum capacity. For instance, if the team has four people, and one of them is taking half the month off, then we can say the team has 87.5% (7/8) of its maximum capacity.
The second item is challenging and it's easy to understimate how much work is left on a given issue once it's been started, particularly if that issue is blocking other issues. We don't currently re-weight issues that carry over (to preserve the original weight), so this is fairly vague at present.
The third item tells us how we've been doing previously. If the trend is downwards, we can look to discuss this in our retrospectives.
Subtracting the carry over weight (item 2) from our expected capacity (the product of items 1 and 3) should tell us our capacity for the next release.
Points of weight delivered by the team in previous milestones, including a 3-month rolling average, are available in this chart. This allows for more accurate estimation of what we can deliver in future milestones.
Issues have the following lifecycle. The colored circles above each workflow stage represents the emphasis we place on collaborating across the entire lifecycle of an issue; and that disciplines will naturally have differing levels of effort required dependent upon where the issue is in the process. If you have suggestions for improving this illustration, you can leave comments directly on the whimsical diagram.
Everyone is encouraged to move issues to different workflows if they feel they belong somewhere else. In order to keep issues constantly refined, when moving an issue to a different workflow stage, please review any open discussions within the issue and update the description with any decisions that have been made. This ensures that descriptions are laid out clearly, keeping with our value of Transparency.
If an issue is > 3 weight, it should be promoted to an epic (quick action) and split it up into multiple issues. It's helpful to add a task list with each task representing a vertical feature slice (MVC) on the newly promoted Epic. This enables us to practice "Just In Time Planning" by creating new issues from the task list as there is space downstream for implementation. When creating new vertical feature slices from an epic, please remember to add the appropriate labels - devops::plan, group::*, Category:* or feature label, and the appropriate workflow stage label - and attach all of the stories that represent the larger epic. This will help capture the larger effort on the roadmap and make it easier to schedule.
A small number of high priority features will be chosen as 'themes' for a period of time. Themes provide an opportunity for the whole team to rally around a deliverable, even if they don't contribute directly to it. These items are given especially close attention by all those involved with a view to delivering small iterations and keeping work unblocked. There should never be more than two themes in progress at a time per team.
Team-members work together to continuously refine the iterations as complexity is revealed.
Examples of successful themes:
In a perfect world, we would have cross-functional representation in every conversation we have with customers. To help work towards realizing this, anyone who is scheduling a call with a customer via sales, conducting usabiity reasearch, or generally setting up a time to speak with customers or prospects is encouraged to add the Plan Customer Interviews calender as an invitee to the event. This will automatically populate the shared calendar with upcoming customer and user iteractions. All team members are welcome and encouraged to join – even if it's just to listen in and get context.
You can subscribe to the calendar and invite it as a participant in a customer meeting that you are scheduling using the URL gitlab.com_5icpbg534ot25ujlo58hr05jd0@group.calendar.google.com.
We perform many board refinement tasks asynchronously, using GitLab issues in the Plan project. The policies for these issues are defined in triage-ops/policies/plan-stage. Some of these issues use supplemental boards:
Other issues just define that, for instance, anything in or to the left of ~"workflow::ready for development" should be moved as a milestone comes to a close. A full list of refinement issues is available by filtering by the ~"Plan stage refinement" label.
While we operate in a continuous Kanban manner, we want to be able to report on and communicate if an issue or epic is on track to be completed by a Milestone's due date. To provide insight and clarity on status we will leverage Issue/Epic Health Status on priority issues.
At the beginning of the Milestone, Product and Engineering Managers will assign the 'On Track' status to agreed-upon priority issues. As the Milestone progresses, anyone contributing to the work should update the Health Status as appropriate to surface risk or concerns as quickly as possible, and to jumpstart collaboration on getting an issue back to "On Track".
We feel it is important to document and communicate, that changing of any item's Health Status to "Needs Attention" or "At Risk" is not a negative action or something to be cause anxiety or concern. Raising risk early helps the team to respond and resolve problems faster and should be encouraged.
As we migrate to using GitLab to track OKRs, the active quarter (FY24-Q1) Objectives will be visible here and Key Results here.
FY23-Q4 OKRs were conducted in Ally.io and are no-longer available.
The Plan stage conducts monthly retrospectives asynchronously using GitLab issues. Monthly retrospectives are performed in a Confidential Issue made Public upon Close. Confidentiality of these Issues while Open aligns with GitLab SAFE Framework.
The Plan Stage team encourages the use of Internal Notes as well to further adhere to SAFE Guidelines. Internal notes remain confidential to participants of the retrospective even after the issue is made public, including Guest users of the parent group. Dogfooding this feature aligns with an FY23 Q4 OKR of improving the GitLab Product development flow by driving the adoption of Plan features.
Examples of information that should remain Confidential per SAFE guidelines are any company confidential information that is not public, any data that reveals information not generally known or not available externally which may be considered sensitive information, and material non-public information.
The retrospective issue is created by a scheduled pipeline in the async-retrospectives project. It is then updated once the milestone is complete with shipped and missed deliverables. For more information on how it works, see that project's README.
An EM from the Plan stage is assigned to each retrospective on a rotational basis as the DRI for conducting and concluding the retrospective, along with summary and corrective actions. The rotation for upcoming milestones is as follows:
| Milestone | DRI |
|---|---|
| 15.8 | John Hope |
| 15.9 | Brandon Labuschagne |
| 15.10 | Donald Cook |
| 15.11 | Kushal Pandya |
| 16.0 | Jarka Košanová |
The role of the DRI is to facilitate a psychologically safe environment where team-members feel empowered to give feedback with candour. As such they should refrain from participating directly. Instead they should publicise, conclude and make improvements to the retrospective process itself.
The DRI is responsible for completing the following actions:
In both the summary comment and video the DRI should be particularly careful to ensure all information disclosed is SAFE. If the retrospective discussion contains examples of unSAFE information, the issue should not be made public.
There are many company, team, process (and other) updates that are important to communicate to team members so that they are not missed. Besides that, there is other information important for day-to-day work. In Plan we use async Weekly updates, called Plan Weekly digest, to communicate these to our team members.
The Engineering Managers in the Plan stage alternate each week as the DRIs. There are 4 groups in the Plan stage, and one SEM, so every EM is the DRI roughly once / 5 weeks.
| Issue creation (auto) | DRI |
|---|---|
| 2023-01-30 | Jarka Košanová |
| 2023-02-06 | Kushal Pandya |
| 2023-02-13 | Donald Cook |
| 2023-02-20 | John Hope |
| 2023-02-27 | Brandon Labuschagne |
Most of our group meetings are recorded and publicly available on YouTube in the Plan group playlist.
We hold a weekly team meeting where all team members across all functions are invited. We currently alternate the meeting time each week to be inclusive of our distributed team. The meeting is either EMEA (+Eastern US) friendly or APAC (+Western US) friendly. Regardless of the timezone we always record each meeting and post it to our youtube playlist.
The agenda follows this format:
If there are no agenda items eight hours prior to the call, we skip the call entirely.
~group::project management
~group::product planning
~group::certify
Each group within the Plan stage follows GitLab's product development flow and process. This allows for consistency across the stage, enables us to align with other stages and stable-counterparts, and enables us to clearly understand our throughput and velocity. We're currently focused on strictly following the process stated in the handbook, as opposed to creating our own local optimizations.
In some cases we need to dogfood a new Plan feature that may adjust our adherence to the GitLab's process. If that happens we assign a DRI responsible for setting the objective, reporting on the outcomes and facilitating feedback to ensure we prioritize improvements to our own product. This ensures we're not making a change for the sake of making changes, and gives us clarity into our own evaluation of a change to the product. In some cases we need to dogfood a new Plan feature that may adjust our adherence to the GitLab's process. If that happens we assign a DRI responsible for setting the objective, reporting on the outcomes and facilitating feedback to ensure we prioritize improvements to our own product. This ensures we're not making a change for the sake of making changes, and gives us clarity into our own evaluation of a change to the product.
There are a couple of process-related improvements we'll continue to adopt:
There can be a gap in understanding between Engineering and Product on a team. We are experimenting with a pilot programme that will allow engineers to spend time in the world of Product, with the goal of greater mutual communication, understanding and collaboration. It helps us work more effectively as a team for better features.
Engineering team-members can shadow a product stable-counterpart. Shadowing sessions last two working days, or the equivalent split over multiple days to maximize experience with different functions of the role. In particular, the session should include at least one customer call. To shadow a counterpart on the team:
Product-Shadowing template;| Month | Engineering counterpart | Product counterpart | Issue link |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2020-07 | Charlie Ablett (@cablett) | Keanon O'Keefe (@kokeefe) | gitlab-org/plan#118 |
| 2020-10 | Jan Provaznik (@jprovaznik) | Gabe Weaver (@gweaver) | gitlab-org/plan#185 |
We're tracking a number of issues that we believe could cause scalability problems in the future.
| Type | Description | Estimated Timeline for Failure | Resolution Due Date | 12 Month Target | Issue | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Int4 Primary Key Overflow | Primary key overflow in the notes table. |
April 2023 | April 2022 | Creation of 1m Notes per Day | Attention | |
| Redis Primary CPU | Unexpected load on the Shared State Redis instance caused by SUBSCRIBE, UNSUBSCRIBE and PUBLISH commands. |
Unknown | April 2022 | 150k Concurrent WebSocket Connections at peak | Okay | |
| Redis Memory | Retention of Action Cable messages in Redis Shared State memory due to high numbers of and/or stalled/hung clients. | Unknown | April 2022 | 150k Concurrent WebSocket Connections at peak | #326364 | Okay |
| Various | Scaling a combined 'Work Items' table consisting of all current issues, epics, requirements and test cases. | Unknown | April 2022 | 100k Work Items created per day | Okay |
Note: Work is ongoing on migration helpers to mitigate Int4 Primary Key Overflows. These will provide a standard way to resolve these issues.