1-1 Issue Generator Training

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What this covers

This training material will cover the following topics:

What the 1-1 issue generator is
How the 1-1 issue generator works
When does the 1-1 issue generator run

What is the 1-1 issue generator

The 1-1 issue generator is a project created in house to assist in the creation of GitLab issues for use in 1 on 1 meetings. This uses a customizable formatting and various APIs to gather details and present it in a way that is useful to both manager and report.

How does the 1-1 issue generator work

This all works utilizing ruby scripting and GitLab CI/CD. The CI/CD component of this is straight forward, in that it has 4 stages and they run the ruby scipts within the project.

Test stage

This stage runs the ./bin/test file within the repo. That file tests for the following:

Is the YAML file able to be parsed?
Do comment YAML files contain the ticket_review boolean?
Do comment YAML files contain the comments array?
Are the template files readable by an ERB renderer?

If any of the above answers are no, then the test stage will fail, preventing the CI/CD from running further. This is used to prevent merging bad files into the repo.

Gather stage

This stage runs the ./bin/gather file within the repo. That file runs the gather function within the Generator::Client class.

The Generator::Client.gather function obtains various data points spanning from:

Zendesk Global
Zendesk US Federal
Pagerduty
GitLab.com

It combines all this data into an artifact file.

Report stage

This stage runs the ./bin/daily_report file within the repo. That file takes the artifact made in the Gather stage and commits it to the Daily reports repo.

Create stage

Note: While previous stages ran for multiple people, some jobs in this stage will only run for a single person at a time.

This stage will run one of three different jobs:

weekly_report: This creates 1-1 issues for weekly use
monthly_report: This creates an issue covering a month's worth of data
quarterly_report: This creates an issue covering the current quarter's worth of data

All of the jobs that run will call to a file in the repo that will link to various functions relating to the job itself. While there is some variance in how the three run, overall they all gather data from the Daily reports repo and then pass it into an ERB template file. This is then compiled into a gitlab.com issue via the GitLab API.

When does 1-1 issue generator run

By using GitLab CI/CD schedules, we have the following set to run at various intervals:

Name	What it does	When it runs
Gather metrics	Runs the Gather stage	Daily at 0100 UTC
Create 1-1 Issues	Runs the Create stage	Daily at 0300 UTC