Shadow Technical Writing team during monthly documentation release

Overview

The Localization team needs to understand the Technical Writing team's documentation release process to develop an effective strategy for managing localized content releases and version branches. By shadowing the documentation release process for GitLab 18, we should observe and document the workflow, and create a plan for how localization activities should align with docs release management.

Goal

  1. Understand the practical aspects of version branch creation (naming, timing, maybe even down to specific commands, etc.)
  2. Understand the pipeline execution for docs deployment
  3. Understand how redirects are managed
  4. Observe how in-progress content (i.e. continuous .md changes in regular MRs) is handled during branch creation
  5. Identify decision points and their impact on localization management
  6. Determine implications for forks management, plan / timeline for localized releases (we may not need localized releases, because we are currently merging Translation MRs from forks into master/main of upstream, but need a plan), localization engineer involvement, localization program manager involvement, etc.
  7. Determine whether continuous localization between releases is necessary or if aligning with the release timeframes is more efficient
  8. Create a proposed workflow (and plan if applicable) for localized releases

References

Edited by Oleksandr Pysaryuk