The Incubation Engineering Department within the Engineering Division focuses on projects that are pre-Product/Market fit. The projects they work on align with the term "new markets" from one of our product investment types. They are ideas that may contribute to our revenue in 3-5 years time. Their focus should be to move fast, ship, get feedback, and iterate. But first they've got to get from 0 to 1 and get something shipped.
We utilize Single-engineer Groups to draw benefits, but not distractions, from within the larger company and GitLab project to maintain that focus. The Single-engineer group encompasses all of product development (product management, engineering, design, and quality) at the smallest scale. They are free to learn from, and collaborate with, those larger departments at GitLab but not at the expense of slowing down unnecessarily.
The Department Head is the VP of Incubation Engineering.
The Incubation Engineering Department is new, and the focus for FY22 is to:
The aim of the SEG's in the Incubation Engineering Department is to get ideas for new markets into the Viable category from our maturity framework. Ideas that we successfully incubate will become a stage or feature within the relevant areas of our product, with full Product, Engineering, UX and Infrastructure support for future development.
In some cases we may invest in an SEG and then decide to acquire an existing product or team in the same area. These situations are disruptive, but unavoidable, and we will work closely with the affected SEG to adapt.
In order to determine our investment into an SEG, we use the following assumptions:
Reference:
Our key focus is to ship software, we do this Iteratively and Transparently in an Agile way, concentrating on having something that works as soon as possible that we can build upon.
For each of our Investment areas, we aim to showcase our progress on a weekly basis using the Engineering Demo Process. On the tracking issue for each area, each SEG should provide a status update and a link to a video of the current functionality by the end of each week. We should aim to develop a scorecard to help grade our progress against each of the key features we are trying to develop, and include this in our weekly update.
We do this in order to ensure alignment with impacted teams at GitLab, to provide opportunties for Collaboration from interested GitLab team members, community members, and users, and finally to demonstrate Results.
The key points to cover in each of our weekly updates are:
When uploading a video to our YouTube channel, we should:
YouTube Playlists
DevOps for Mobile
APM
MLOps
Five Minute Production
The Incubation Engineering department commits to and tracks quarterly Objectives and Key Results (OKRs).
The 5 Minute Production App Group will look at our developer onboarding experience and how to make it easier for Web App developers to quickly get their application deployed to Production, and to have the re-assurance that it can scale when needed.
The goal of the DevOps for Mobile Apps SEG is to improve the experience for Developers targeting mobile platforms by providing targeted CI/CD capabilities and workflows that improve the experience of provisioning and deploying mobile apps.
The goal of the DevOps for Salesforce SEG is to integrate DevOps capabilities for our customers that develop Salesforce applications.
The Jamstack group aims to enable Front End developers to simplify their toolkit by using GitLab to manage, build, and deploy externally-facing, static websites using the Jamstack architecture.
The MLOps Group will be focused on enabling data teams to build, test, and deploy their machine learning models. This will be net new functionality within GitLab and will bridge the gap between DataOps teams and ML/AI within production. MLOps will provide tuning, testing, and deployment of machine learning models, including version control and partial rollout and rollback.
The Monitor APM Group aims to integrate monitoring and observability into our DevOps Platform in order to provide a convenient and cost effective solution that allows our customers to monitor the state of their applications, understand how changes they make can impact their applications performance characteristics and give them the tools to resolve issues that arise.
This group is split into three APM's that will focus on each part of the architecture:
Monitor APM:Agent
Collecting logs and traces from production systems.
Monitor APM:Storage
Storing and querying APM data.
Monitor APM:Visualisation
Charts and tables of APM data, with UX for querying and drilling down.
The No-Code / Low-Code SEG will integrate with popular low/no-code platforms as well as provide a low code experience inside of GitLab.
The Real-time Editing of Issue Descriptions (REID) is gathering feedback on what merge requests and code review in GitLab may be in the future and how we can significantly decrease the cycle time, increase the efficiency of code review, and create better ways of collaborating through real-time experiences.
The Server Runtime SEG will explore how we can increase customer usage and company revenue by delivering a cloud hosted development environment natively within GitLab.com.
The Service Desk SEG will improve our existing Service Desk offering by integrate support requests into the standard GitLab workflow.
We use the RICE Framework for prioritization of ideas.
Reach |
Impact |
Confidence |
|---|---|---|
| How many of our users, prospects, or customers will benefit from this feature. | Revenue, risk, or cost benefits to GitLab and our customers. | How well we understand the customer problem and our proposed solution. |
|
|
|
Effort |
||
| How many months before we can launch an MVP to gather feedback (1 - 3). | ||
The total score is calculated by (Reach x Impact x Confidence) / Effort
The following table is driven by the relevant RICE labels on the issues themselves.
If you would like to propose a Single Engineer Group please reach to our VP of Incubation Engineering.
An AMA was held in May 2021.
Incubation Engineering Key Performance Indicators
You can also reach us on Slack at #incubation-eng in Slack (GitLab internal)
incubation or experimental feature without distracting / taking away from the GitLab user experience?incubation feature.In order to maintain consistency, the process below should be followed when starting a new SEG from an incubation backlog project:
meta project within that new group. For example: mlops/metameta project. This issue will replace the existing backlog project issue and be used to post weekly demo recordings from the new SEG. For example: jamstack| Add all labels from the original backlog issue to the issue you just created. For example: original issue | new issue |
seg_issues_list in the handbook direction generator module in the handbook. See this MR for an example.