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Engineering Workflow

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This document explains the workflow for anyone working with issues in GitLab Inc. For the workflow that applies to the wider community see the contributing guide.

GitLab Flow

Products at GitLab are built using the GitLab Flow.

We have specific rules around code review.

Reverting a merge request

In line with our values of short toes, making two-way-door decisions and bias for action, anyone can propose to revert a merge request. When deciding whether an MR should be reverted, the following should be true:

Reverting merge requests that add non-functional changes and don't remove any existing capabilities should be avoided in order to prevent designing by committee.

The intent of a revert is never to place blame on the original author. Additionally, it is helpful to inform the original author so they can participate as a DRI on any necessary follow up actions.

The pipeline:expedite label, and master:broken or master:foss-broken label must be set on merge requests that fix master to skip some non-essential jobs in order to speed up the MR pipelines.

Broken master

If you notice that pipelines for the master branch of GitLab or GitLab FOSS are failing, returning the build to a passing state takes priority over everything else development related, since everything we do while tests are broken may:

What is a broken master?

A broken master is an event where a pipeline in master is failing.

The cost to fix test failures increases exponentially as time passes due to merged results pipelines used. Auto-deploys, as well as monthly releases and security releases, depend on gitlab-org/gitlab master being green for tagging and merging of backports.

Our aim should be to keep master free from failures, not to fix master only after it breaks.

Broken master service level objectives

There are two phases for fixing a broken master incident which have a target SLO to clarify the urgency. The resolution phase is dependent on the completion of the triage phase.

Phase Service level objective DRI
Triage 4 hours from the initial broken master incident creation until assignment Engineering Productivity team
Resolution 4 hours from assignment to DRI until incident is resolved Merge request author or team of merge request author or dev on-call engineer

Additional details about the phases are listed below.

Broken master escalation

If a broken master is blocking your team (such as creating a security release) then you should:

  1. See if there is a non-resolved broken master incident with a DRI assigned and check discussions there.
  2. Check discussions on the failure notification in the Slack #master-broken channel. If there isn't a discussion, ask in #master-broken if there's anyone investigating the incident you are looking at
  3. If there is not a clear DRI or action to resolve then use the dev escalation process to solicit help in the broken master incident.

Triage broken master

The Engineering Productivity team is the triage DRI for monitoring, identification, and communication of broken master incidents.

Definitions

Triage DRI Responsibilities

  1. Monitor
    • Pipeline failures are sent to #master-broken and will be reviewed by the team.

    • If the incident is a duplicate of an existing incident, use the following quick actions to close the duplicate incident:

       /assign me
 /duplicate #<original_issue_id>
 /copy_metadata #<original_issue_id>
    • If the incident is not a duplicate, and needs some investigation:
      • Assign the incident to yourself: /assign me
      • Change the incident status to Acknowledged (in the right-side menu).
      • In Slack, the :ack: emoji reaction should be applied by the triage DRI to signal the linked incident status has been changed to Acknowledged and the incident is actively being triaged.
  2. Identification
    • Review non-resolved broken master incidents for the same failure. If the broken master is related to a test failure, search the spec file in the issue search to see if there's a known failure::flaky-test issue.
    • If this incident is due to non-flaky reasons, communicate in #development, #backend, and #frontend using the Slack Workflow.
      • Click the "lightning bolt" shortcut icon in the #master-broken channel and select Broadcast Master Broken, then click Continue the broadcast.
      • Create a revert MR directly to save some time in case we need to revert down the line.
        • If you are reverting an MR that performs a database migration, you need to follow the Deployment blockers process to prevent the migration from proceeding to deploy and running on staging and production.
        • If the migration is executed in any environments, communicate to the release managers in #releases channel and discuss whether it's appropriate to create another migration to roll back the first migration or turn the migration into a no-op by following Disabling a data migration steps.
    • If you identified that master fails for a flaky reason, and it cannot be reliably reproduced (i.e. running the failing spec locally or retry the failing job):
      • Quarantine the failing test.
      • If a flaky test issue already exists, add a comment in it with a link to the failed broken master incident and/or failed job.
      • If a flaky test issue doesn't exist, create an issue from the New issue button in top-right of the failing job page (that will automatically add a link to the job in the issue), and apply the Broken Master - Flaky description template.

      • Add the appropriate labels to the main incident:

        # Add those labels
/label ~"master-broken::flaky-test" 
/label ~"failure::flaky-test" 

# Pick one of those labels
/label ~"flaky-test::dataset-specific" 
/label ~"flaky-test::datetime-sensitive" 
/label ~"flaky-test::ordering assertion" 
/label ~"flaky-test::random input" 
/label ~"flaky-test::transient bug" 
/label ~"flaky-test::unclean environment" 
/label ~"flaky-test::unreliable dom selector" 
/label ~"flaky-test::unstable infrastructure"
      • Close the incident
    • Add the stacktrace of the error to the incident, as well as Capybara screenshots if available in the job artifacts.
      • To find the screenshot: download the job artifact, and copy the screenshot in artifacts/tmp/capybara to the incident if one is available.
    • Identify the merge request that introduced the failures. There are a few possible approaches to try:
    • If you identified a merge request, assign the incident to its author if they are available at the moment. If they are not available, assign to the maintainer that approved/merged the MR. If none are available, mention the team Engineering Manager and seek assistance in the #development Slack channel.
      • You can find the team somebody is in and who's the manager for that team by searching in https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/product/categories/.
    • If no merge request was identified, ask for assistance in the #development Slack channel.

    • Please set the appropriate ~master-broken:* label from the list below:

      /label ~"master-broken::caching" 
/label ~"master-broken::ci-config" 
/label ~"master-broken::dependency-upgrade"
/label ~"master-broken::flaky-test" 
/label ~"master-broken::fork-repo-test-gap" 
/label ~"master-broken::pipeline-skipped-before-merge"
/label ~"master-broken::test-selection-gap"
/label ~"master-broken::need-merge-train"
/label ~"master-broken::infrastructure"
/label ~"master-broken::runner-disk-full"
/label ~"master-broken::gitaly"
/label ~"master-broken::external-dependency-unavailable"
/label ~"master-broken::failed-to-pull-image"
/label ~"master-broken::gitlab-com-overloaded"
/label ~"master-broken::undetermined"
    • When the master-broken is resolved, close the incident.
  3. (Optional) Pre-resolution
    • If the triage DRI believes that there's an easy resolution by either:
      • Reverting a particular merge request.
      • Making a quick fix (for example, one line or a few similar simple changes in a few lines). The triage DRI can create a merge request, assign to any available maintainer, and ping the resolution DRI with a @username FYI message. Additionally, a message can be posted in #backend_maintainers or #frontend_maintainers to get a maintainer take a look at the fix ASAP.

Resolution of broken master

The merge request author of the change that broke master is the resolution DRI. In the event the merge request author is not available, the team of the merge request author will assume the resolution DRI responsibilities. If a DRI has not acknowledged or signaled working on a fix, any developer can take assume the resolution DRI responsibilities by assigning themselves to the incident.

Responsibilities of the resolution DRI

  1. Prioritize resolving broken master incidents over new bug/feature work. Resolution options include:
    • Default: Revert the merge request which caused the broken master. If a revert is performed, create an issue to reinstate the merge request and assign it to the author of the reverted merge request.
      • Reverts can go straight to maintainer review and require 1 maintainer approval.
      • The maintainer can request additional review/approvals if the revert is not trivial.
      • The pipeline:expedite label, and master:broken or master:foss-broken label must be set on merge requests that fix master to skip some non-essential jobs in order to speed up the MR pipelines.
    • Quarantine the failing test if you can confirm that it is flaky (e.g. it wasn't touched recently and passed after retrying the failed job).
      • Add the quarantined test label to the failure::flaky-test issue you previously created during the identification phase.
    • Create a new merge request to fix the failure if revert is not possible or would introduce additional risk. This should be treated as a priority::1 severity::1 issue.
      • To ensure efficient review of the fix, the merge request should only contain the minimum change needed to fix the failure. Additional refactor or improvement to the code should be done as a follow-up.
  2. Apply the Pick into auto-deploy label (along with the needed severity::1 and priority::1) to make sure deployments are unblocked.
  3. If the broken master incident affects any stable branches (e.g. https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests/25274) or is caused by a flaky failure, open new merge requests directly against the active stable branches and ping the current release manager in the merge requests to avoid delays in releases / security releases. See How to fix a broken stable branch guide for more details.
  4. Communicate in #master-broken when the fix was merged
  5. Once the incident is resolved, click the "lightning bolt" shortcut icon in the #master-broken channel and select Broadcast Master Fixed, then click Continue the broadcast.
  6. When master build was failing and the underlying problem was quarantined / reverted / temporary workaround created but the root cause still needs to be discovered, the investigation should continue directly in the incident.
  7. Create an issue for the Engineering Productivity team describing how the broken master incident could have been prevented in the Merge Request pipeline.

Responsibilities of authors and maintainers

Once the resolution DRI announces that master is fixed:

Merging during broken master

Merge requests can not be merged to master until the incident status is changed to Resolved.

This is because we need to try hard to avoid introducing new failures, since it's easy to lose confidence if it stays red for a long time.

In the rare case where a merge request is urgent and must be merged immediately, team members can follow the process below to have a merge request merged during a broken master.

Criteria for merging during broken master

Merging while master is broken can only be done for:

How to request a merge during a broken master

First, ensure the latest pipeline has completed less than 2 hours ago (although it is likely to have have failed due to gitlab-org/gitlab using merged results pipelines).

Next, make a request on Slack:

  1. Post to either the #frontend_maintainers or #backend_maintainers Slack channels (whichever one is more relevant).
  2. In your post outline why the merge request is urgent.
  3. Make it clear that this would be a merge during a broken master, optionally add a link to this page in your request.

Instructions for the maintainer

A maintainer who sees a request to merge during a broken master must follow this process.

Note, if any part of the process below disqualifies a merge request from being merged during a broken master then the maintainer must inform the requestor as to why in the merge request (and optionally in the Slack thread of the request).

First, assess the request:

  1. Add the :eyes: emoji to the Slack post so other maintainers know it is being assessed. We do not want multiple maintainers to work on fulfilling the request.
  2. Assess whether the merge request is urgent or not. If in doubt, ask the requestor for more details in the merge request about why it is urgent.

Next, ensure that all the following conditions are met:

  1. The latest pipeline has completed less than 2 hours ago (although it is likely to have failed due to gitlab-org/gitlab using merged results pipelines).
  2. All of the latest pipeline failures also happen on master.
  3. There is a corresponding non-resolved broken master incidents. See the "Triage DRI Responsibilities" steps above for more details.

Next, add a comment to the merge request mentioning that the merge request will be merged during a broken master, and link to the broken master incident. For example:

Merge request will be merged while `master` is broken.

Failure in <JOB_URL> happens in `master` and is being worked on in <INCIDENT_URL>.

Next, merge the merge request:

Broken master mirrors

#master-broken-mirrors was created to remove duplicative notifications from the #master-broken channel which provides a space for Release Managers and the Engineering Productivity team to monitor failures for the following projects:

The #master-broken-mirrors channel is to be used to identify unique failures for those projects and flaky failures are not expected to be retried/reacted to in the same way as #master-broken.

Broken JiHu validation pipelines

We run JiHu validation pipelines in some of the merge requests, and it can be broken at times. When this happens, check What to do when the validation pipeline failed for more details.

Security Issues

Security issues are managed and prioritized by the security team. If you are assigned to work on a security issue in a milestone, you need to follow the Security Release process.

If you find a security issue in GitLab, create a confidential issue mentioning the relevant security and engineering managers, and post about it in #security.

If you accidentally push security commits to gitlab-org/gitlab, we recommend that you:

  1. Delete the relevant branch ASAP
  2. Inform a release manager in #releases. It may be possible to execute a garbage collection (via the Housekeeping task in the repository settings) to remove the commits.

For more information on how the entire process works for security releases, see the documentation on security releases.

Basics

  1. Start working on an issue you’re assigned to. If you’re not assigned to any issue, find the issue with the highest priority and relevant label you can work on, and assign it to yourself. You can use this query, which sorts by priority for the started milestones, and filter by the label for your team.
  2. If you need to schedule something or prioritize it, apply the appropriate labels (see Scheduling issues).
  3. If you are working on an issue that touches on areas outside of your expertise, be sure to mention someone in the other group(s) as soon as you start working on it. This allows others to give you early feedback, which should save you time in the long run.
  4. If you are working on an issue that requires access to specific features, systems, or groups, open an access request to obtain access on staging and production for testing your changes after they are merged.
  5. When you start working on an issue:
    • Add the workflow::in dev label to the issue.
    • Create a merge request (MR) by clicking on the Create merge request button in the issue. This creates a MR with the labels, milestone and title of the issue. It also relates the just created MR to the issue.
    • Assign the MR to yourself.
    • Work on the MR until it is ready, it meets GitLab's definition of done, and the pipeline succeeds.
    • Edit the description and click on the Remove the Draft: prefix from the title button.
    • Assign it to the suggested reviewer(s) from Reviewer Roulette. If there are reviewers for multiple categories, for example: frontend, backend and database, assign all of them. Alternatively, assign someone who specifically needs to review. When assigning, also @mention them in the comments, requesting a review.
    • (Optionally) Unassign yourself from the MR. Some may find leaving the MR assigned to themselves easier to track the MRs they are responsible for by using the built in MR button/notification icon in the GitLab navigation bar.
    • Change the workflow label of the issue to workflow::in review. If multiple people are working on the issue or multiple workflow labels might apply, consider breaking the issue up. Otherwise, default to the workflow label farthest away from completion.
    • Potentially, a reviewer offers feedback and assigns back to the author.
    • The author addresses the feedback and this goes back and forth until all reviewers approve the MR.
    • After approving, the reviewer in each category unassigns themselves and assigns the suggested maintainer in their category.
    • Maintainer reviews take place with any back and forth as necessary and attempts to resolve any open threads.
    • The last maintainer to approve the MR, follows the Merging a merge request guidelines.
    • (Optionally) Change the workflow label of the issue to workflow::verification, to indicate all the development work for the issue has been done and it is waiting to be deployed and verified. We will use this label in cases where the work was requested to be verified by product OR we determined we need to perform this verification in production.
  6. You are responsible for the issues assigned to you. This means it has to ship with the milestone it's associated with. If you are not able to do this, you have to communicate it early to your manager and other stakeholders (e.g. the product manager, other engineers working on dependent issues). In teams, the team is responsible for this (see Working in Teams). If you are uncertain, err on the side of overcommunication. It's always better to communicate doubts than to wait.
  7. You (and your team, if applicable) are responsible for:
  8. Once a release candidate has been deployed to the staging environment, please verify that your changes work as intended. We have seen issues where bugs did not appear in development but showed in production (e.g. due to CE-EE merge issues).

Be sure to read general guidelines about issues and merge requests.

Working in Teams

For larger issues or issues that contain many different moving parts, you'll be likely working in a team. This team will typically consist of a backend engineer, a frontend engineer, a Product Designer and a product manager.

  1. Teams have a shared responsibility to ship the issue in the planned release.
    1. If the team suspects that they might not be able to ship something in time, the team should escalate / inform others as soon as possible. A good start is informing your manager.
    2. It's generally preferable to ship a smaller iteration of an issue, than ship something a release later.
  2. Consider starting a Slack channel for a new team, but remember to write all relevant information in the related issue(s). You don't want to have to read up on two threads, rather than only one, and Slack channels are not open to the greater GitLab community.
  3. If an issue entails frontend and backend work, consider separating the frontend and backend code into separate MRs and merge them independently under feature flags. This will ensure frontend/backend engineers can work and deliver independently.
    1. It's important to note that even though the code is merged behind a feature flag, it should still be production ready and continue to hold our definition of done.
    2. A separate MR containing the integration, documentation (if applicable) and removal of the feature flags should be completed in parallel with the backend and frontend MRs, but should only be merged when both the frontend and backend MRs are on the master branch.

In the spirit of collaboration and efficiency, members of teams should feel free to discuss issues directly with one another while being respectful of others' time.

Convention over Configuration

Avoid adding configuration values in the application settings or in gitlab.yml. Only add configuration if it is absolutely necessary. If you find yourself adding parameters to tune specific features, stop and consider how this can be avoided. Are the values really necessary? Could constants be used that work across the board? Could values be determined automatically? See Convention over Configuration for more discussion.

Choosing Something to Work On

Start working on things with the highest priority in the current milestone. The priority of items are defined under labels in the repository, but you are able to sort by priority.

After sorting by priority, choose something that you’re able to tackle and falls under your responsibility. That means that if you’re a frontend developer, you work on something with the label frontend.

To filter very precisely, you could filter all issues for:

Use this link to quickly set the above parameters. You'll still need to filter by the label for your own team.

If you’re in doubt about what to work on, ask your lead. They will be able to tell you.

Triaging and Reviewing Code from the rest of the Community

It's every developers' responsibilities to triage and review code contributed by the rest of the community, and work with them to get it ready for production.

Merge requests from the rest of the community should be labeled with the Community contribution label.

When evaluating a merge request from the community, please ensure that a relevant PM is aware of the pending MR by mentioning them.

This should be to be part of your daily routine. For instance, every morning you could triage new merge requests from the rest of the community that are not yet labeled Community contribution and either review them or ask a relevant person to review it.

Make sure to follow our Code Review Guidelines.

Workflow Labels

Labels are described in our Contribution guide and Product Development Flow.

Working with GitLab.com

GitLab.com is a very large instance of GitLab Enterprise Edition. It runs release candidates for new releases, and sees a lot of issues because of the amount of traffic it gets. There are several internal tools available for developers at GitLab to get data about what's happening in the production system:

Performance Data

There is extensive monitoring publicly available for GitLab.com. For more on this and related tools, see the monitoring handbook.

Error Reporting

Scheduling Issues

GitLab Inc has to be selective in working on particular issues. We have a limited capacity to work on new things. Therefore, we have to schedule issues carefully.

Product Managers are responsible for scheduling all issues in their respective product areas, including features, bugs, and tech debt. Product managers alone determine the prioritization, but others are encouraged to influence the PMs decisions. The UX Lead and Engineering Leads are responsible for allocating people making sure things are done on time. Product Managers are not responsible for these activities, they are not project managers.

Direction issues are the big, prioritized new features for each release. They are limited to a small number per release so that we have plenty of capacity to work on other important issues, bug fixes, etc.

If you want to schedule an issue with the Seeking community contributions label, please remove the label first.

Any scheduled issue should have a team label assigned, and at least one type label.

Requesting Something to be Scheduled

To request scheduling an issue, ask the responsible product manager

We have many more requests for great features than we have capacity to work on. There is a good chance we’ll not be able to work on something. Make sure the appropriate labels (such as customer) are applied so every issue is given the priority it deserves.

Product Development Timeline

Teams (Product, UX, Development, Quality) continually work on issues according to their respective workflows. There is no specified process whereby a particular person should be working on a set of issues in a given time period. However, there are specific deadlines that should inform team workflows and prioritization. Suppose we are talking about milestone m that will be shipped in month M (on the 22nd). We have the following deadlines:

Refer to release post content reviews for additional deadlines.

Note that deployments to GitLab.com are more frequent than monthly major/minor releases on the 22nd. See auto deploy transition guidance for details.

Updating Issues Throughout Development

Team members use labels to track issues throughout development. This gives visibility to other developers, product managers, and designers, so that they can adjust their plans during a monthly iteration. An issue should follow these stages:

Kickoff

At the beginning of each release, we have a kickoff meeting, publicly livestreamed to YouTube. In the call, the Product Development team (PMs, Product Designers, and Engineers) communicate with the rest of the organization which issues are in scope for the upcoming release. The call is structured by product area with each PM leading their part of the call.

The notes are available in a publicly-accessible Google doc. Refer to the doc for details on viewing the livestream.

Retrospective

The purpose of our retrospective is to help each Product Group, and the entire R&D cost center at GitLab learn and improve as much as possible from every monthly release.

Each retrospective consist of three parts:

Timeline

Moderator

The moderator of each retrospective is responsible for:

The job of a moderator is to remain objective and is focused on guiding conversations forward. The moderator for each retrospective is assigned by the VP Development in each milestone.

Retrospective planning and execution issue

For each monthly release, a Retrospective planning and execution issue (example) is opened by the moderator to help us coordinate this work.

Create the Retrospective planning and execution issue by selecting the 'product-development-retro' issue template in the 'www-gitlab-com' project.

Title the issue <MILESTONE VERSION #> Team Retrospectives.

Set the due date to 2 days before the Retrospective Discussion to encourage team members to contribute prior to recording of the Retrospective Summary video.

Retro doc

The retro doc is a Google Doc we use to collaborate on for our Retrospective Summary and Retrospective Discussion.

Group Retrospectives

At the end of every release, each team should host their own retrospective. For details on how this is done, see Group Retrospectives.

Retrospective Summary

Note - we are currently conducting an experiment with section-based Retrospective Summaries. During such time we will not be conducting an R&D-wide Retrospective Summary.

The Retrospective Summary is a short pre-recorded video which summarizes the learnings across all Group Retrospectives (example video, example presentation).

Once all Group Retrospectives are completed, each team inputs their learnings into a single publicly-accessible retro doc. The moderator then pre-records a video of the highlights. This video is then announced in the Retrospective planning and execution issue along with the #whats-happening-at-gitlab slack channel. In line with our value of transparency, we also post this video to our public GitLab Unfiltered channel.

Steps for participants

  1. Please host your Group Retrospective following the guidelines outlined in the handbook.
  2. After the Group Retrospective is complete, please choose a subset some of your most interesting learnings to share company-wide in the retro doc. Please try to group by these by our CREDIT values.
  3. In the retro doc, if there is a learning that you would like to explicitly highlight, please add the text highlight at the beginning of the text. The moderator will highlight this along with other learnings listed in the retro doc when they create the pre-recorded video.
  4. If there are improvement tasks for your team from the previous retrospective, please provide an update on them in the retro doc. They will be verbalized during the Retrospective Discussion.
  5. If there are improvement tasks for your team in the current retrospective, please add them in the retro doc. They will be verbalized during the Retrospective Discussion.
  6. Add a checkbox in the table of the Retrospective planning and execution issue when your Group Retrospective is complete and when the retro doc is updated.

Steps for the moderator

  1. Please read through the Group Retrospective learnings in the retro doc.
  2. Add the learnings into a slide deck and identify the highlights you would like to cover.
  3. Record a video presentation summarizing the highlights.
  4. Upload this video to our public GitLab Unfiltered channel.
  5. Announce the video and discussion topics in Retrospective planning and execution issue, the #whats-happening-at-gitlab slack channel, and the retro doc.

Retrospective Discussion

The Retrospective Discussion is a 25 minute live discussion among participants where we deep dive into discussion topics from our Group Retrospectives (example). In line with our value of transparency, we livestream this meeting to YouTube and monitor chat for questions from viewers. Please check the retro doc for details on joining the livestream.

Discussion Topics

For each retrospective discussion, we aim to host an interactive discussion covering two discussion topics. We limit this to two topics due to the length of the meeting.

The discussion topics stem from our Group Retrospective learnings and should be applicable to the majority of participants.

Discussion topics are suggested by participants by commenting on the Retrospective planning and execution issue. Participants can vote on these topics by adding a :thumbsup: reaction. The two topics with the most :thumbsup: votes will be used as the discussion topics. If there are not enough votes or if the discussion topics are not relevant to the majority of participants, the moderator can choose other discussion topics.

Meeting Agenda

Steps for participants

  1. Suggest discussion topics by commenting on to the Retrospective planning and execution issue.
  2. Vote on discussion topics by adding a :thumbsup: reaction. Voting closes on M+1, 3rd.
  3. Once discussion topics are announced on M+1, 4th, begin adding your comments to the retro doc.
  4. During the Retrospective Discussion, be prepared to verbalize any improvement tasks or commentary on the discussion topics. If you can't make the meeting and there is an item for you to verbalize, please ask someone else on your team to attend to do so.

Steps for the moderator

  1. In the Retrospective planning and execution issue, create a thread asking participants to suggest and vote on topics.
  2. Voting ends at the close of business on M+1, 3rd. Take note of which discussion topics have the most votes at this time. If there are not enough votes or if you deem the discussion topics as not relevant to the majority of participants, please choose other discussion topics.
  3. Announce the discussion topics alongside of the Retrospective Summary video in the Retrospective planning and execution issue, the #whats-happening-at-gitlab slack channel, and the retro doc
  4. Ensure the Retrospective Discussion calendar invite is sent to participants by coordinating with the VP Development.
  5. Host the Retrospective Discussion and press livestream to YouTube.
  6. After the Retrospective Discussion, close the Retrospective planning and execution issue.

Utilizing Internal Notes in Retrospective Issues

Monthly retrospectives are usually performed in a confidential issue made public upon close. Content of these issues while public aligns with GitLab SAFE Framework.

Where unSAFE information must be discussed in a retrospective, Internal Notes should be utilized in order to 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.

Examples of information that should remain Confidential per SAFE guidelines are any company confidential information that is not public, or any data that reveals information not generally known or not available externally which may be considered sensitive information. Specific examples of information that should be carefully submitted to the retrospective include impact on revenue, information relating to the security of the platform, or specific customer data.

Triaging retrospective improvements

At the end of each retrospective the Engineering Productivity team is responsible for triaging improvement items identified from the retrospective. This is needed for a single owner to be aware of the bigger picture technical debt and backstage work. The actual work can be assigned out to other teams or engineers to execute.

Retrospective Summary Moderators for FY22

The Moderator for the Retrospective Summary is chosen on a quarterly basis. For FY22 we have selected 4 moderators from across Engineering and Product. The moderators are:

Retrospective Summary Experiment in FY22 Q4

During FY22 Q4 (the 14.4, 14.5, 14.6 Retrospectives) we will conduct an experiment where we perform retrospective summaries at the Section level instead of an R&D-wide retrospective summary. Section level leaders in Product and Development are the DRIs for retrofitting the current retrospective summary process for their section and documenting their process for doing so.

Experiment Hypothesis

As GitLab has grown, there have become too many layers between a group retrospective and the company-wide retrospective. Performing retrospective summaries at the Section level will increase our rate of learning and encourage broader collaboration between stable counterparts across the R&D organization.

Experiment Success Measurements

We'll consider this experiment a success if:

Experiment Section DRIs

While leaders are available in the categories page (and subject to change) - we explicitly call out the DRIs for each section in this experiment.

Conducting a Section Retrospective

Discretion is provided to Section leaders on how to conduct a section retrospective discussion. A good starting point would be to follow the current handbook and issue template recommendations for our R&D wide retrospective. Consider creating section versions of the issue template and discussion doc.

Milestone Cleanup

Engineering Managers are responsible for capacity planning and scheduling for their respective teams with guidance from their counterpart Product Managers.

To ensure hygiene across Engineering, we run scheduled pipelines to move unfinished work (open issues and merge requests) with the expired milestone to the next milestone, and label ~"missed:x.y" for the expired milestone. Additionally, label ~"missed-deliverable" whenever ~"Deliverable" is presented.

This is currently implemented as part of our automated triage operations. Additionally, issues with the ~Deliverable label which have a milestone beyond current +1, will have the ~Deliverable label removed.

We keep the milestone open for 3 months after it's expired, based on the release and maintenance policy.

The milestone cleanup is currently applied to the following groups and projects:

Milestones closure is in the remit of the Delivery team. At any point in time a release might need to be created for an active milestone,and once that is no longer the case, the Delivery team closes the milestone.

Milestone cleanup schedule

The milestone cleanup will happen one weekday before the 22nd (release day).

The following is observed to account for the weekends:

These actions will be applied to open issues:

Milestones are closed when the Delivery team no longer needs to create a backport release for a specific milestone.

Kickoff and Retrospective Public Stream Instructions

Both the monthly kickoff and retrospective meetings are publicly streamed to the GitLab Unfiltered YouTube Channel. The EBA for Engineering is the moderator and responsible for initiating the Public Stream or designating another moderator if EBA is unable to attend.

Use Group Labels and Group Milestones

When working in GitLab (and in particular, the GitLab.org group), use group labels and group milestones as much as you can. It is easier to plan issues and merge requests at the group level, and exposes ideas across projects more naturally. If you have a project label, you can promote it to a group milestone. This will merge all project labels with the same name into the one group label. The same is true for promoting group milestones.

Technical debt

We definitely don't want our technical debt to grow faster than our code base. To prevent this from happening we should consider not only the impact of the technical debt but also a contagion. How big and how fast is this problem going to be over time? Is it likely a bad piece of code will be copy-pasted for a future feature? In the end, the amount of resources available is always less than amount of technical debt to address.

To help with prioritization and decision-making process here, we recommend thinking about contagion as an interest rate of the technical debt. There is a great comment from the internet about it:

You wouldn't pay off your $50k student loan before first paying off your $5k credit card and it's because of the high interest rate. The best debt to pay off first is one that has the highest loan payment to recurring payment reduction ratio, i.e. the one that reduces your overall debt payments the most, and that is usually the loan with the highest interest rate.

Technical debt is prioritized like other technical decisions in product groups by product management.

For technical debt which might span, or fall in gaps between groups they should be brought up for a globally optimzed prioritization in retrospectives or directly with the appropriate member of the Product Leadership team. Additional avenues for addressing technical debt outside of product groups are Rapid Action issues and working groups.

UX debt

Sometimes there is an intentional decision to deviate from the agreed-upon MVC, which sacrifices the user experience. When this occurs, the Product Designer creates a follow-up issue and labels it UX debt to address the UX gap in subsequent releases.

For the same reasons as technical debt, we don't want UX debt to grow faster than our code base.

These issues are prioritized like other technical decisions in product groups by product management. You can see the number of UX debt issues on the UX Debt dashboard.

As with technical debt, UX debt should be brought up for globally optimized prioritization in retrospectives or directly with the appropriate member of the Product Leadership team.

UI polish

UI polish issues are visual improvements to the existing user interface, touching mainly aesthetic aspects of the UI that are guided by Pajamas foundations. UI polish issues generally capture improvements related to color, typography, iconography, and spacing. We apply the UI polish label to these issues. UI polish issues don't introduce functionality or behavior changes to a feature.

Examples of UI polish

What is not UI polish

Open merge requests sometimes become idle (not updated by a human in more than a month). Once a month, engineering managers will receive an Merge requests requiring attention triage issue that includes all (non-WIP/Draft) MRs for their group and use it to determine if any action should be taken (such as nudging the author/reviewer/maintainer). This assists in getting merge requests merged in a reasonable amount of time which we track with the Open MR Review Time (OMRT) and Open MR Age (OMA) performance indicators.

Open merge requests may also have other properties that indicate that the engineering manager should research them and potentially take action to improve efficiency. One key property is the number of threads, which, when high, may indicate a need to update the plan for the MR or that a synchronous discussion should be considered. Another property is the number of pipelines, which, when high, may indicate a need to revisit the plan for the MR. These metrics are not yet included in an automatically created a triage issue. However, they are available in a Sisense dashboard. Engineering managers are encouraged to check this dashboard for their group periodically (once or twice a month) in the interim.

Security is everyone's responsibility

Security is our top priority. Our Security Team is raising the bar on security every day to protect users' data and make GitLab a safe place for everyone to contribute. There are many lines of code, and Security Teams need to scale. That means shifting security left in the Software Development LifeCycle (SDLC). Each team has an Application Security Stable Counterpart who can help you, and you can find more secure development help in the #sec-appsec Slack channel.

Being able to start the security review process earlier in the software development lifecycle means we will catch vulnerabilities earlier, and mitigate identified vulnerabilities before the code is merged. You should know when and how to proactively seek an Application Security Review. You should also be familiar with our Secure Coding Guidelines.

We are fixing the obvious security issues before every merge, and therefore, scaling the security review process. Our workflow includes a check and validation by the reviewers of every merge request, thereby enabling developers to act on identified vulnerabilities before merging. As part of that process, developers are also encouraged to reach out to the Security Team to discuss the issue at that stage, rather than later on, when mitigating vulnerabilities becomes more expensive. After all, security is everyone's job. See also our Security Paradigm

Rapid Engineering Response

From time to time, there are occasions that engineering team must act quickly in response to urgent issues. This section describes how the engineering team handles certain kinds of such issues.

Scope

Not everything is urgent. See below for a non-exclusive list of things that are in-scope and not in-scope. As always, use your experience and judgment, and communicate with others.

Process

  1. Person requesting Rapid Engineering Response creates an issue supplying all known information and applies priority and severity (or security severity and priority) to the best of their ability.
  2. Person requesting Rapid Engineering Response raises the issue to their own manager and the subject matter domain engineering manager (or the delegation if OOO).
    1. In case a specific group cannot be determined, raise the issue to the Director of Engineering (or the delegation if OOO) of the section.
    2. In case a specific section cannot be determined, raise the issue to the Sr. Director of Development (or the delegation if OOO).
  3. The engineering sponsor (subject matter Manager, Director, and/or Sr. Director) invokes all stakeholders of the subject matter as a rapid response task force to determine the best route of resolution:
    1. Engineering manager(s)
    2. Product Management
    3. QE
    4. UX
    5. Docs
    6. Security
    7. Support
    8. Distribution engineering manager
    9. Delivery engineering manager (Release Management)
  4. Adjust priority and severity or security severity and priority if necessary, and work collaboratively on the determined resolution.

Performance Refinement

A bi-weekly performance refinement session is held by the Development and QE teams jointly to raise awareness and foster wider collaboration about high-impact performance issues. A high impact issue has a direct measurable impact on GitLab.com service levels or error budgets.

Scope

The Performance Refinement issue board is reviewed in this refinement exercise.

Process

  1. To participate in the bi-weekly refinement, ask your engineering director to forward the invite of the Performance Refinement meeting which is at 15:00 UTC every other Thursday. Here is the meeting agenda.
  2. To nominate issues to the board:
    1. Assign a performance severity on the issue to help asses the priority assignment for the refinement session.
    2. Ensure that the issue clearly explains the problem, the (potential) impact on GitLab.com's availability, and ideally, clearly defines a proposed solution to the problem.
    3. Use the label bug::performance.
  3. For the issues under the Open column:
    1. An engineering manager will be assigned if either the Milestone or the label workflow::ready for development is missing.
    2. Engineering manager brings assigned issue(s) to the Product Manager for prioritization and planning.
    3. Engineering manager unassigns themselves once the issue is planned for an iteration, i.e. associated with a Milestone and the label workflow::ready for development.
  4. To highlight high-impact issues which need additional discussion, please add an agenda item.
  5. If a guest attendee would be helpful for collaboration, please forward the invite. For example, a CSM or Support Engineer may have information that would be helpful for an upcoming topic.

Infradev

The infradev process is established to identify issues requiring priority attention in support of SaaS availability and reliability. These escalations are intended to primarily be asyncronous as timely triage and attention is required. In addition to primary management through the Issues, any gaps, concerns, or critical triage is handled in the SaaS Availability weekly standup.

Scope

The infradev issue board is the primary focus of this process.

Roles and Responsibilities

Infrastructure

  1. Nominate issues by adding Infradev label.
  2. Assess Severity and Priority and apply the corresponding label as appropriate.
  3. Provide as much information as possible to assist development engineering troubleshooting.

Development

  1. Development directors are responsible for triaging Infradev issues regularly by following the triage process below.
  2. Development managers are encouraged to triage issues regularly as well.
  3. Development managers collaborate with their counterpart Product Managers to refine, schedule, and resolve Infradev issues.
  4. Usually, issues are nominated as Infradev issues by SREs or Managers in the Infrastructure Department. Development engineers/managers are not expected to nominate Infradev issues.
    1. However, when it's necessary to spin off new issues from an existing Infradev issue, development engineers and managers may also apply Infradev label to the new issues.
    2. When development engineers and managers split off new Infradev issues, they must have a Severity and Priority labels to the new issues. The labels should correspond to the importance of the follow-on work.

Product Management

  1. Product Managers perform holistic prioritization of both product roadmap and Infradev issues as one unified backlog.
  2. Product Managers collaborate with their counterpart Development Managers to refine, schedule, and resolve Infradev issues.

Triage Process

(To be completed primarily by Development Engineering Management)

Issues are nominated to the board through the inclusion of the label infradev and will appear on the infradev board.

  1. Review issues in the Open column. Look for issues within your Stage/Group/Category, but also for those which lack a clear assignment or where the assignment may need correction.
  2. Review the severity on the issue to validate appropriate prioritization.
  3. Ensure that the issue clearly explains the problem, the (potential) impact on GitLab.com's availability, and ideally, clearly defines a proposed solution to the problem.
  4. Assign a Development Manager and a Product Manager to any issue where the Milestone or the label workflow::ready for development is missing.
    1. Development Manager and Product Manager collaborate on the assigned issue(s) for prioritization and planning.
    2. Development Manager and Product Manager unassign themselves once the issue is planned for an iteration, i.e. associated with a Milestone and the label workflow::ready for development.
  5. All Issues should be prioritized into the appropriate workflow stage. It is the intent to maintain no Open (un-triaged) items.

Issues with ~infradev ~severity::1 ~priority::1 ~production request labels applied require immediate resolution.

~infradev issues requiring a ~"breaking change" should not exist. If a current ~infradev issue requires a breaking change then it should split into two issues. The first issue should be the immediate ~infradev work that can be done under current SLOs. The second issue should be ~"breaking change" work that needs to be completed at the next major release in accordance with handbook guidance. Agreement from development DRI as well as the infrastructure DRI should be documented on the issue.

Infradev issues are also shown in the monthly Error Budget Report.

A Guide to Creating Effective Infradev Issues

Triage of infradev Issues is desired to occur asynchronously. These points below with endure that your infradev issues gain maximum traction.

  1. Use the InfraDev issue template to create the issue on the gitlab-org/gitlab issue tracker.
  2. Clearly state the scope of the problem, and how it affects GitLab.com. Examples could include:
    1. Reliability issues: the problem could cause a widespread outage or degradation on GitLab.com. example
    2. Saturation issues: the problem could leave to increased saturation, latency issues due to resource over-utilization. example
    3. Service-level degradation: the problem is causing our service-level monitoring to degrade, impacting the overall SLA of GitLab.com and potentially leaving to SLA violations. example
    4. Unnecessary alerts: the problem does not have a major impact on users, but is leading to extraneous alerts, impacting the ability of SREs to effectively triage incidents due to alerting noise. example
    5. Problems which extend the time to diagnosis of incidents: for example, issues which degrade the observability of GitLab.com, swallow user-impacting errors or logs, etc. These could lead to incidents taking much longer to clear, and impacting availability. example
    6. Deficiencies in our public APIs which lead to customers compensating by generating substantially more traffic to get the required results. example
  3. Quantify the effect of the problem to help ensure that correct prioritization occurs.
    1. Include costs to availability. The Incident Budget Explorer dashboard can help here.
    2. Include the number of times alerts have fired owing to the problem, how much time was spent dealing with the problem, and how many people were involved.
    3. Include screenshots of visualization from Grafana or Kibana.
    4. Always include a permalink to the source of the screenshot so that others can investigate further.
  4. Provide a clear, unambiguous, self-contained solution to the problem. Do not add the infradev label to architectural problems, vague solutions, or requests to investigate an unknown root-cause.
  5. Ensure scope is limited. Each issue should be able to be owned by a single stage group team and should not need to be broken down further. Single task solutions are best.
  6. Ensure a realistic severity is applied: review the availability severity label guidelines and ensure that applied severity matches. Always ensure all issues have a severity, even if you are unsure.
  7. If possible, include ownership labels for more effective triage. The product categories can help determine the appropriate stage group to assign the issue to.
  8. Cross-reference links to Production Incidents, PagerDuty Alerts, Slack Alerts and Slack Discussions. To help ensure that the team performing the triage have all the available data.
    1. By adding "Related" links on the infradev issue, the Infradev Status Report will display a count of the number of production incidents related to each infradev issue, for easier and clearer prioritization.
  9. Ensure that the issue title is accurate, brief and clear. Change the title over time if you need to keep it accurate.
  10. By adding an infradev label to an issue, you are assuming responsibility and becoming the sponsor/champion of the issue.
  11. Provide a method for validating that the original issue still exists
    1. Sometimes infradev issues will resolve on their own, or are resolved as a side-effect of an unrelated change.
    2. In the infradev issue description, provide a clear way of checking whether the problem still exists.
    3. Having a way of checking validity can save on a great deal of back-and-forth discussion between Infradev Triage participants including Engineering Managers, Directors and Product Managers and make space for other non-resolved issues to get scheduled sooner.
    4. Ideally, provide a link to a Thanos query or an ELK query and clear instructions on how to interpret the results to determine whether the problem is still occurring. Check the "Verfication" section in this issue as an example of this.
    5. Alternatively, provide clear instructions on how to recreate or validate the problem.
    6. If an issue has been resolved, use the following process:
      1. Reassign the issue back to the author, or an appropriate owner, requesting that they confirm the resolution, and close the issue if they concur. If not, they should follow up with a note and unassign themselves.
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