The Fulfillment Product Team and the L&R Support Team work closely together to identify, understand and prioritize issues in the Fulfillment-related parts of our product.
When you encounter a product problem while working on a Zendesk ticket, use this workflow.
Support Priority::Scored
to the issue. Otherwise,
add Support Priority::Categorize
to indicate that GitLab Support wants
to see this addressed.Support Priority
to ensure inclusion of issues and epics on various product boards
and reports that are not priority-based.Customer::Impact
and UX
The Support and Fulfillment teams use a combination of one epic board and two
issue boards to prioritize and manage the issues and epics of interest to
Support. Collectively, these can be thought of as Support's Issue List for
Fulfillment
.
The list is the single source of truth for describing the product issues that are of concern to L&R Support. For updates and discussions about Fulfillment's actions related to the issues and epics, see the monthly Fulfillment Support Priority Monthly Review issue, which is created from this template.
The issue and epic boards that comprise the list are available to all GitLab Team Members. They are:
Each board in the list presents issues or epics that have one of the
Support Priority::X
scoped labels attached, and organizes them into lists by
support priority number.
Within each list on a board, Fulfillment PMs and EMs will sort the cards to indicate further prioritization.
Support Priority::1
- The Top 10 ListAt any given time there should be no more than 10 issues and epics labeled
Support Priority::1
. Together, those items are known as the Top 10 List
.
They are the items that L&R Support has decided are the most important
product issues for the Fulfillment Team to address.
Support Priority::2
- The Next 10 ListAt any given time there should be no more than 10 issues and epics labeled
Support Priority::2
. Together, those items are known as the Next 10 List
.
They are the items that fell just short of getting selected for the
Top 10. L&R Support would like Fulfillment to select items to work from this
list if not all resources are devoted to the Top 10.
Support Priority::3
and Support Priority::4
- All the RestIssues and epics set to priorities three and four are still of interest to L&R Support, but the expectation is that they will be addressed last.
Anyone who wants to request that any issue or epic in the list be reviewed for possible reprioritization should:
Support Priority::Review
labelSupport Priority::Categorize
or Support Prioritize::Review
On a monthly basis, aligned with the product release cycle, L&R Support will determine what changes, if any, are needed in the list. At this time the Regional DRIs will:
Support Priority::Categorize
by creating a new
issue from the Monthly Prioritization
templateSupport Priority::Review
, and change the score for those accordinglyBy agreement with the Fulfillment Product Management Team, Support will keep the Top 10 list as stable as possible, making changes only when:
L&R Support wants it to be fairly easy for anyone in L&R to decide the most
appropriate priority for any issue or epic on the list. And, we want to have a
framework for those decisions that will allow us to be reasonably consistent
and fact-based. For those reasons, we have defined a set of factors to be
considered when prioritizing, and we have created a simple calculator to
combine "scores" from each factor into a single number, which we call the
Support Priority Score
.
All of the factors must be considered in order to paint the full picture of the importance of a given issue or epic. Even so, consider them as general guidelines that leave us room to make decisions without having to gather hard data for every one of them. In other words, we will exercise our best judgment using the information at hand.
The calculator is a simple spreadsheet. You'll find the instructions on the right. Just fill in the value for each factor, and the Priority Score is automatically calculated. In addition, below the score is an automatically generated bit of markdown that you may copy in order to paste at the end of the issue's or epic's description field.
So why have a calculator if we're being subjective rather than objective? The calculator reminds us of the factors we want to consider and gives us a standard way to combine all of them consistently.
We want to be clear about whether Support's interest is in the full Epic or in only one or more of the child issues and epics. The process will vary a little between these two situations.
Support wants to see the entire epic addressed and resolved. Seeing the individual child epics and issues in our list is not useful here. Only progress on the epic matters. In this situation, we will:
~Support Priority::1-4
label with the label, ~Support Priority::See Epic
(Note: this will result in the relabeled items no longer being visible on
our epic/issue boards)In this way we will show and track only the epic in the list. In the event that
one or more children of interest to us are removed from the epic, we should at
that time add those children back to the list by re-prioritizing them. We can
detect this type of event by looking for items that have the
~Support Priority::See Epic
label but do not have an associated epic.
The epic is not the item of interest to us. Rather, one or more (but not all) of the children are. In this situation, we will:
If you require technical assistance from any Fulfillment Development Section Sub Group for issues that are not bugs or feature requests, then you can use GitLab.com to create an issue and request help. The workflow for this process is documented in the following handbook section How to Use GitLab.com to Formally Request Help from the GitLab Development Team.