Coordinated pipeline - switch non-blocking QA jobs to be trigger jobs
Problem statement
In the coordinated pipeline, we have a qa:full:gstg job that needs to be triggered but does not need to be completed or passing for our deployment to continue. I think qa:orchestrated:gstg is also a non-bllocking QA test suite (@mayra-cabrera do you know?).
At the moment we have these jobs in the coordinated pipeline as bridge jobs but set to be allowed to fail. I think there are two problems with this:
- Release Managers are required to know that certain QA jobs are allowed to fail, but others must be passing in order to proceed. This increases the RM learning curve and could risk us trying, or possibly succeeding, in promoting a package to production without the required tests passing.
- At the moment we're suffering from a bug in coordinated pipelines that means any failure on the pipeline can lead to other jobs being skipped. Recently this happened and the job that was skipped was the QA:smoke:gstg job which holds the trigger to move the pipeline on. If we miss that this has happened it can look like we're waiting on QA jobs because our non-required QA jobs are running but really, we're waiting for a skipped job to start and complete.
Proposal
We need to trigger the non-blocking QA jobs but we don't need to wait for their result so how about we remove the full job from the coordinated pipeline and replace it with a ```non-blocking QA tests`` trigger job that triggers the individual test suites but doesn't wait for the results.
This would keep the coordinated pipeline clean as we'd have fewer jobs and it would mean a failing QA job is something to be investigated as it would either mean a failed trigger or a failed essential test suite. Making this change would also help us avoid accidentally waiting on the full QA job if the shorter QA:smoke:gstg job is skipped or failing but not notifying for some reason.
what do you think @gitlab-org/delivery ?
Implementation
strategy: depend was removed from the qa:full:gstg and qa:full:gprd-cny bridge jobs (gitlab-org/release-tools!1675 (merged)), so that they don't wait for the downstream pipelines to complete. The bridge jobs are now marked successful once the downstream pipeline has started.