| KPI | Health | Reason | Next Steps |
| Hiring Actual vs Plan | Okay | Engineering is on plan. But we are lending some of our recruiters to sales for this quarter. And we just put in place a new "one star minimum" rule that might decrease offer volume. | |
| Bugs past target SLO | Problem | We have prioritized efforts. We will likely not trend downwards until the backlog of older bugs are closed. | |
| New issue first triage SLO | Unknown | We haven’t started measuring it yet. We have made progress on fanning out first triage to Engineers in the Quality Department. | |
| Ratio of bugs triaged with Severity (and priority) | Attention | The number of untriaged bugs have been stable but we can still do better. We need to establish an actionable threshold for each team. | |
Are we able to hire high quality workers to build our product vision in a timely manner? Hiring information comes from BambooHR where employees are in the division `Engineering`.
URL(s)
Health: Okay
Engineering is on plan. But we are lending some of our recruiters to sales for this quarter. And we just put in place a new "one star minimum" rule that might decrease offer volume.
Maturity: Level 2 of 3
We have charts driven off of team.yml
Next Steps
Measure the number of bugs past the priority SLO timeline.
URL(s)
Health: Problem
We have prioritized efforts. We will likely not trend downwards until the backlog of older bugs are closed.
Maturity: Level 2 of 3
Automated data collection achieved but not in time series yet.
Next Steps
Measure our speed to triage new issues. We currently have ~400 new issues every week in CE/EE. We need to go through all of them and identify valid issues and high severity bugs.
URL(s)
Health: Unknown
We haven’t started measuring it yet. We have made progress on fanning out first triage to Engineers in the Quality Department.
Maturity: Level 1 of 3
We haven’t started measuring it yet.
Next Steps
Measure our ability to differentiate high severity defects from the pool so we can prioritize fixing them above trivial bugs.
URL(s)
Health: Attention
The number of untriaged bugs have been stable but we can still do better. We need to establish an actionable threshold for each team.
Maturity: Level 2 of 3
Data collection is achieved. Need to present in time series. No threshold defined yet.
Next Steps
Diversity is one of our core values, and a general challenge for the tech industry. GitLab is in a privileged position to positively impact diversity in tech because our remote lifestyle should be more friendly to people who may have left the tech industry, or studied a technical field but never entered industry. This means we can add to the diversity of our industry, and not just play a zero-sum recruiting game with our competitors.
URL(s)
Health: Attention
Engineering is now at the tech benchmark for gender diversity (~16%), but our potential is greater and we can do better. 20% should be our floor in technical roles. Other types of diversity are unknown.
Maturity: Level 2 of 3
The content is shared only in a closed metrics review, and does not have granularity. It’s not visualized, or in time series.
Next Steps
The handbook is essential to working remote successfully, to keeping up our transparency, and to recruiting successfully. Our processes are constantly evolving and we need a way to make sure the handbook is being updated at a regular cadence.
URL(s)
Health: Unknown
Unknown. But my sense is we are not doing enough. For instance, we have not been able to fully update the handbook after the development department re-org (dev backend, and ops backend are still present. Although many of the new teams do have their own pages already)
Maturity: Level 2 of 3
We currently just have contribution graphs, which are a poor proxy for this.
Next Steps
People are a priority and attrition comes at a great human cost to the individual and team. Additionally, recruiting (backfilling attrition) is a ludicrously expensive process, so we prefer to keep the people we have :)
URL(s)
Health: Okay
I seem to recall our attrition is now below 10% which is great compared to the tech benchmark of 22% and the remote benchmark for 16%, but the fact that I can’t just look at a simple graph makes me nervous...
Maturity: Level 2 of 3
There is manually curated data in a spreadsheet from PO
Next Steps
Tells us the hit rate of defects per each stage group on a monthly basis
URL(s)
Health: Problem
Defect trends on a high level is increasing for mature areas of the product, but also due to double counting from duplicate issues. We need to raise more awareness and encourage teams to look at this metric and evaluate themselves regularly.
Maturity: Level 3 of 3
Data collection is achieved, need to migrate this into GitLab Insights (productized version) and configure dashboard for each stage groups. No threshold defined yet.
Next Steps
Tells us the monthly average time to resolve high severity defects.
URL(s)
Health: Problem
We have prioritized efforts and trend is stabilizing. We will likely not trend downwards until the backlog of older bugs are closed.
Maturity: Level 2 of 3
Automated data collection achieved.
Next Steps
Measures the stability of our test tooling to enable engineering efficiency.
URL(s)
Health: Unknown
We have only manual data collection week to week. Rate is fluctuating between 70%-90%
Maturity: Level 1 of 3
We only have an idea or a plan
Next Steps
Measure amount of throw away work vs merged.
URL(s)
Health: Attention
From experimental charts we don’t have that much throw away work. Not giving a passing grade because we don’t have a threshold to grade against.
Maturity: Level 3 of 3
Automation possible, experimental work (~4hrs) done in Quality Dashboard. To be added into Native GitLab Insights. No threshold has been established.
Next Steps
| Level | Meaning |
| Level 3 of 3 | Measurable, time series, identified target for the metric, automated data extraction, dashboard in Periscope available to the whole company (if not the whole world) |
| Level 2 of 3 | About two-thirds done. E.g. Missing one of: automated data collection, defined threshold, or periscope dashboard. |
| Level 1 of 3 | About one-third done. E.g. Has one of: automated data collection, defined threshold, or periscope dashboard. |
| Level 0 of 3 | We only have an idea or a plan. |
| Level | Meaning |
| Okay | The KPI is at an acceptable level compared to the threshold |
| Attention | This is a blip, or we’re going to watch it, or we just need to enact a proven intervention |
| Problem | We'll prioritize our efforts here |
| Unknown | Unknown |
The heart of pages like this is a data file called /data/performance_indicators.yml which is in YAML format. Almost everything you need to do will involve edits to this file. Here are some tips:
: in strings as it's an important character in YAML and will confuse the data parsing process. Put the string in "quotes" if you really need to use a :urls: should be an array (indented lines starting with dashes) even if you only have one urlmaturity.level and health.level take a number between 0 and 3 (inclusive)Pages like /handbook/engineering/performance-indicators/ are rendered by and ERB template.
These ERB templates call the helper function performance_indicators() that is defined in /helpers/custom_helpers.rb. This helper function calls in several partial templates to do it's work.
This function takes a required argument named org in string format that limits the scope of the page to a portion of the data file. Possible valid values for this org argument are listed in the orgs property of each element in the array in /data/performance_indicators.yml.
