Milestone Planner MVC
Proposal
Develop a new application to be used by Create EMs to perform milestone planning. The application would support EMs across the full life cycle of planning a milestone:
- Preparation: Creation of the planning issue, planning and build boards
- PTO: Calculate team PTO from a PTO Deel download
- Capacity: Calculate team capacity and allow EM adjustments via a table view
- Planning: Sync the planning board and allow the EM to assign team members to issues
- Assignments: Assign engineers to GitLab issues and auto-add labels
This application would increase cross-stage Transparency in planning and harmonise existing planning processes, which would make it more Efficient for EMs to support each other during PTO. It would be possible to provide the Director a single view of all planning across the stage.
A battle-tested version of this functionality has been used by groupsource code for several years, but it is focused on groupsource code only and based around Google Sheets. The existing Ruby code could be reused and a single sign-on against GitLab Omniauth used to control access and would not be publicly viewable due to team member data privacy.
This application would be a standalone Ruby on Rails application, but be tightly integrated into the main GitLab application via the API. In the future it could be potentially shared with other stages or even upstreamed to the GitLab application as a Release planning tool for customer use.
See also https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/create-stage/create-stage/-/issues/84+