Plan the rollout of the Maintenance Policy Extension
This issue aims to gather all the separate tasks we'll need to complete in order to successfully announce the Maintenance Policy extension. With a full rollout plan, we can estimate the project timeline.
Switching to the extended Maintenance Policy includes two changes. These will be handled as separate iterations:
- Enable developers to start merging into stable release branches so that they can self-serve on bug fixes rather than relying 100% on release managers to get their changes into patch/minor releases. This drives two things
- Reduce release manager workload
- Increase throughput for stage teams (lower cognitive load requirement on self-serve vs engaging other teams)
- Extend the existing Maintenance Policy to support bug fixes for three versions. This change will bring bug fixes in line with the current security support policy.
Plan
Due to the fact that customers are required to be on 15.11 for a clean upgrade path to 16.0, it makes sense to have 15.11 and 15.10 supported from the release of 16.0.
- 15.10 - Introduce process to allow developers to merge onto stable branches & communicate changes to stage teams, product & Announce upcoming Policy changes (blogpost, release notes)
- 15.11 - Review number of MRs, plan process changes, re-communicate
- 16.0 - Announce changes on official channels again, 16.0, 15.11 & 15.10 officially supported
Repeat communication across the quarter is key and we need to verify by 15.11 that the authors of changes are not blocked by our process unnecessarily
Proposed Timeline
- 2023-03-08 - Internal announcement of upcoming changes to the developer process (#2863 (closed)). Use to promote AMA
- 2023-03-15 - AMA focused on Maintenance Policy & developer process changes
- 2023-03-15 - Internal comms for 15.10 release managers announced.
- 2023-03-22 - Rollout of the development tools for internal use. Gather feedback and improve tools and processes as needed.
- 2023-04-22 - Re-communicate Internally upcoming policy change
- Spread comms across product, engineering and support
- Validate each stage team with changes has been able to merge to stable branch 15.10
- Measure Release Manager workload
- 2023-05-22 - Target Maintenance Policy Extended with Major release (TBD with iteration and feedback)
- Release notes 16.0
- Blog post or are release notes enough?
- Supported versions 16.0, 15.11, 15.10 - #2862
- Rolling 3 version period
- Maintenance Policy updated
- 2023-05-22 - Communicate planned changes externally
- Blogpost
- Release notes 15.10 link to blog post
Rollout Tasks
-
Create issue in corp marketing project https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/marketing/corporate_marketing/corporate-marketing/-/issues/7640 -
Developer, product and release manager announcements (Internal). Feedback issues created (#2863 (closed)) #2886 (closed), #2902 (closed) -
AMA focused on Maintenance Policy & developer process changes -
Rollout of the development tools for internal use -
Measure Release Manager Workload impact -
Re-communicate changes to stage team, engineering, product (Internal) -
Prep 15.11 release notes -
Decision on 16.0. or Delay (Based on Release Manager workload impact) -
Blogpost announcing changes in 16.0 (link to issue/MR)
-
Status 2023-04-26
The action items on this issue are paused until a decision on the maintenance policy extension is made #2832 (comment 1367263485)