Merge Request Rate

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Maintained by:

Eric Johnson

@edjdev

On this page

• MR Rate Performance indicators
• Definition
• Terminology
• Examples
• Projects that are part of the product
  • Updating the list of projects

MR Rate Performance indicators

• R&D Overall MR Rate
  • R&D Wider MR Rate
  • R&D Narrow MR Rate (TBD)
    • Engineering Division Narrow MR Rate
      • Development Department Narrow Rate
      • Infrastructure Department Narrow Rate
      • Quality Department Narrow Rate
      • Security Department Narrow Rate
      • Support Department Narrow Rate
      • UX Department Narrow Rate

Definition

MR Rate is a measure of productivity and efficiency. The numerator is a collection of merge requests to a set of projects. The denominator is a collection of people. Both are tracked over time (usually monthly).

Terminology

For clarity, when referring to an MR rate, you must use the format: [Identity] [Postfix] MR Rate.

• [Identity] is collection of people (the denominator) and is usually a Division, Department, Sub-Department, or Team name from our Organizational Structure
• The [postfix] defines the MRs that are counted
  • "Overall" means all the MRs to the project are counted, regardless of author
  • "Wider" means only MRs authored by non-GitLab team members are counted
  • "Narrow" means ony the MRs authored by members of the organization are counted
• The [Postfix] defines the Dividends or Numerator. The [Identity] is the Denominator or Divisor.

The reason we sometimes track the Wider rate is that MRs from our community take effort from one of our coaches to merge, and we want to incentivize that behavior.

Examples

A 5 member team in the past month has merged 200 MRs authored by team members, merged 100 MRs authored by other GitLab team members, and 50 MRs authored by people from the wider-community.

• The Team Overall MR Rate would be 70 (350 / 5)
• The Team Narrow MR Rate would be 40 (200 / 5)
• The Team Wider MR Rate would be 10 (50 / 5)

Projects that are part of the product

In the MR Rate and Volume of MR calculations, we consider MRs from projects that contributes to the overall product efforts.

The current list of projects are identified in the gitlab-data/analytics project for the following system databases:

Updating the list of projects

The guidelines for inclusion in the is_part_of_product lists are:

• Included with the product as apart of a GitLab Omnibus or Cloud Native installation
• Support product development efforts
• Support the delivery and release process to GitLab SaaS

Follow these steps to request a new project to be tracked:

1. Create a merge request to the GitLab.com or ops.gitlab.net project list from above.
2. Assign the merge request to the Manager of Engineering Productivity team
3. The Manager of the Engineering Productivity team will work with the Development Operations Analyst to determine the changes to MR Rate metrics and provide validation for the projects
4. The VP of Development is the DRI to approve the list of projects. Upon approval the merge request author should ask in #data for assistance by a member of the Data Engineering team to merge.

Please reach out to a member of the Engineering Productivity team if more assistance is needed