Release Orchestration Minimal to Viable Evaluation

Current State Evaluation

Release Orchestration was made available in GitLab with the implementation of the Releases Page in 11.7 . The Maturity plan to bring Release Orchestration to "Minimal" was to expand the Releases API capabilities to include:

• Add milestones
• Add and Edit Links via API
• Show Upcoming & scheduled releases

After implementing these feature sets, we saw an increase in the Releases Page on GitLab.com:

As well as adoption from our internal teams, such as:

• Runner team
• GitLab.org
• CNG

Proposed Transition to Viable

According to the current definition of maturity in the GitLab Handbook, Viable is defined as "used by significant numbers of GitLab team members and users to solve real problems". We would like to declare, that as of 2020-03-22 (12.9), Release Orchestration is Viable, as a result of the sustained production usage of Releases.

In addition, when we conducted a baseline of "Create a Release Job To Be Done", we learned the following behaviors were expected to reach viability:

• Users expected to create a release from the release page
• Users want more options in UI

We then turned a focus to building in 12.8 and 12.9:

• Editing from the Release page
• Create a Release from UI

Now that those two features are delivered, the top pain points for the non-API users have been resolved and we are expecting the adoption of Releases Page to further increase.