Investigate Move to Yearly Major Version Release Cadence
For 2019, we move the 12.0 major version release to June. After the 12.0 release, May will be our default major version release month.
Reasons:
- Move to a 12 month gap between 11.0 (June '18) and 12.0 (June '19) instead of an 8 month gap
- Only a 11 month gap between 12.0 (June '19) and 13.0 (May '20)
- Avoid GitLab Contribute for 2019
Per @sytses and @JobV , investigate moving to a yearly major version release cadence in order to help our enterprise customers schedule and implement the newest major release of GitLab according to their internal policies and validation procedures. Per our maintenance policy, major versions may break backwards compatibility and therefore may require regulated industries or risk averse customers to implement more rigorous testing for major version implementation. Proposed major version release month would be May each year.
Reasons for:
- Customers always know when a major version will be released
- Customers can plan around GitLab major releases and can staff/schedule accordingly as they validate the new release
- GitLab product team can procedurally align major features to this milestone each year
- 12 months is the proposed cadence based on:
Yearly major releases are standard in the enterprise software market
There was a 15 month gap between 8.0 and 9.0, which was frustrating for both engineering and customers
There was a 6 month gap between 9.0 and 10.0, which was frustrating for customers - Why May?
Avoid holidays and high travel months of summer
Provide enough testing time for customers to upgrade prior to the holidays
Reasons against:
- A major version will now live for 12 months, and minor versions will increment up to 11, leading to double digit minor versions which isn't aesthetically pleasing (i.e. GitLab version 11.10)
- From an engineering perspective, major versions means deprecation, therefore, moving to a yearly release cadence means we can only deprecate things once a year, potentially slowing down tech debt items
- Major features potentially held up for the annual major release which is misaligned to our product shipping philosophy and lends to less business agility
To Do:
-
Proposed implementation via MR to handbook and docs -
Engineering sign-off -
Product sign-off -
Technical writing sign off -
Implement change and rollout to broader team
Edited by Eric Brinkman