Ops Sub-Department FY23 Sustaining Planning Exercise
Goal
Identify what percentage of each group’s staffing is required for ongoing sustaining work.
Request
- Each engineering manager create a confidential issue plan that shows what staffing is required for sustaining work.
- For this purpose sustaining work is defined as security, ~availability,
infradev
,scaling
,performance
, andmaintaining team efficiency
. - The plan should be captured in a GitLab issue and include the following two sections:
- Staffing Plan - A table including the required number of team members each quarter in each role
- Staffing Justification - A short (1-3 paragraph) explanation of how the plan was arrived at.
- Examples of justification - Security bugs coming in FY22, infradev issues coming in FY22, backlogs, rate of fix per team. Anticipated scaling issues (or parts of the system will break). Package upgrades (package dependencies and frequency of upgrades)
Example
Walrus Group Sustaining Staffing Plan
Staffing required for sustaining work (security, availability, infradev, scaling, performance, and maintaining team efficiency)
FY23-Q1 | FY23-Q2 | FY23-Q3 | FY23-Q4 | |
---|---|---|---|---|
Backend Engineers (for sustaining work only) | 2 | 3 | 3 | 3 |
Frontend Engineers (for sustaining work only) | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
Fullstack Engineers (for sustaining work only) | 1 | 2 | 2 | 2 |
Walrus Group Sustaining Staffing Justification
In FY21-Q3 and Q4 the Walrus group saw an average of 5 security or infradev issues created each month. Based on close rates we determined this requires about 2 BE engineers to maintain SLOs for these issues. In addition the team has 2 team members (1 FE/1BE) devoted to key scaling initiatives. With 1 BE and 1 FE working on these efforts we made much slower progress than initially hoped for (initial aim was 2-3 months, current projection is to be finished after 6+ months of work). Based on these results and analysis 4 BE and 1 FE are required to stay on top of sustaining workload. We expect this to increase in FY22-Q3 which is the targeted release date for new feature X.
Engineering Managers
Please check off your name and replace [issue link]
with a link to your confidential issue once you've created it.
-
@crystalpoole - [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/monitor/monitor/-/issues/90] -
@erushton - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/ops-sub-department/ops-engineering-management/-/issues/44 -
@samdbeckham - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/verify-stage/-/issues/162 -
@marknuzzo - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/verify-stage/-/issues/142 -
@shampton - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/verify-stage/-/issues/163 -
@avielle / @cheryl.li - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/ops-sub-department/ops-engineering-management/-/issues/41 -
@michelletorres - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/ci-cd/package-stage/package/-/issues/32 -
@nicholasklick - [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/ops-sub-department/ops-engineering-management/-/issues/40] -
@nicolewilliams - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/ci-cd/release-group/release/-/issues/97
/cc @sgoldstein