Announce the extension of the maintenance policy internally

Context

Once the pilot for the extension is over, and we're ready to rollout the extension of the maintenance policy for bug fixes, we need to align the announcement with the early branch creation process.

We're opting to announce both changes in the release processes together in order to help us reduce the noise and make the transition faster for gitlab team members.

This was discussed in delivery#21117.

Timeline

As discussed in #21117 (comment 2580116071) and Launch coordination: New monthly release proces... (#21430), we plan to internally announce both changes (maintenance policy extension and early branch creation) one month before the 18.4 release, on the week of August 18th (release week for 18.3). This is to give enough time for engineers to anticipate and prepare for these changes.

Announcement and feedback issue

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/gl-infra/delivery/-/issues/21474+

Slack Announcement

📣 Reducing backport exception overhead for regular bug fixes 📣

To increase engineering efficiency, GitLab engineers are now enabled to self-serve on backporting bug fixes into the maintained stable branches. No need for backport request issues to backport bug fixes for the maintained versions. This is an internal process change to foster adoption and measure the impact.

📝 For full details, questions, and feedback, please refer to the announcement issue.

Communication channels

  • ChatOps announcement from #f_upcoming_release
  • announcement in #engineering-fyi slack channel
  • forward announcement in #what's-happening-at-gitlab slack channel
  • forward announcement in #product slack channel
  • Add to Engineering Week-in-review

Exit Criteria

Edited by Jenny Kim