Create Code Review Group and Rebalance Existing Create Groups
Summary
We need more focus on code review as the core workflow of our product. 33% of users on every instance utilize merge requests and we must ensure this experience in GitLab is world class. Creating a new group titled Code Review allows us a single team to focus on the repository, branching, and SCM aspects of the product, while having the new group focus on the review experience.
At the same time, some of our editor features, while great experiences, have reached a point where they are largely complete. Snippets, while now containing versioning and multiple files, don't have many users, and the Web IDE, while providing a great unified experience for editing, is still only 33% of the usage of the single file editor.
Plan
In order to create a code review group, we will combine the Static Site Editor and Editor groups into a single Editor group and split Source Code. We will also rebalance these groups so they have the appropriate amount of engineers for each group to be successful. This plan should include the names of each team member and which group they will be going to.
The Gitaly team is unaffected by this rebalancing from a personnel perspective. Ecosystem is also unaffected by this rebalancing initiative; however, there is a separate realignment happening to provide Ecosystem four additional developers.
Amongst these groups we currently have the following personnel:
- PM: 3
- FE: 11
- BE: 11 (Org chart shows 12, but we are losing 1 to realignment for Fulfillment)
- PD: 3
- BEM: 2.5 (shared BEM for Knowledge and Editor currently)
- FEM: 1.5 (shared FEM for Knowledge and Editor currently)
- SDET: 2
- TW: 1
Personnel Proposal
| Group | PM | FEM | BEM | FE | BE | PD | SDET | TW |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Source Code | 1 (Daniel Gruesso) | TBD | TBD | 2 | 4 | 1 (Mike Nichols) | 1 | 1 |
| Code Review | 1 (Kai Armstrong) | TBD | TBD | 4 | 5 | 1 (Pedro Moreira da Silva) | 1 | 0 |
| Editor | 1 (Eric Schurter) | TBD | TBD | 5 | 3 | 1 (Michael Le) | 0 | 0 |
Product
Source Code
- PM: Daniel Gruesso
- PD: Mike Nichols
- Categories: Source Code Management
Code Review
- PM: Kai Armstrong
- PD: Pedro Moreira da Silva
- Categories: Code Review, Editor Extensions
Editor
- PM: Eric Schurter
- PD: Michael Le
- Categories: Web IDE, Live Preview, Snippets, Static Site Editor, Settings/Navigation, GitLab Docs, Wikis
- Pause improvements on Web IDE and Live Preview based on usage data
- Pause improvements to snippets similar to Web IDE based on usage data
- Remove GitLab Handbook "on-call" escalations within team
- Remove categories GitLab Handbook from scope of team
- Navigation and Settings will still be a main focus for this group
- GitLab Docs will remain part of the team's charter, but with minimal effort put towards to the docs project
- Wikis will move to the group as part of the realignment towards Fulfillment with Knowledge being dissolved, but will have no investment or focus from the team.
| Categories | Priority | Expected % of Dev Time | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Settings/Navigation | 1 | 50% | 6 month scope ideally |
| Static Site Editor | 2 | 30% | Rich text editing work, can scale to other editing experiences |
| Web IDE | 3 | 15% | Includes SFE, propose rename to Web Editors, focus on Web IDE performance |
| Wikis | 4 | 0% | No new feature work |
| Snippets | 5 | 0% | No new feature work |
| Live Preview | 6 | 5% | Only fix Codesandbox service workers, remote dev not actively prioritized |
| GitLab Docs | 7 | 0% | Only highest priority needs from Docs team |
All of these PMs will report to @jramsay.
Engineering
Communication Plan & Timeline
We will follow the timeline in the Fulfillment realignment issue: https://gitlab.com/adawar/fulfillment-analytics-eco-reorg/-/issues/2#2020-11-02