Request for comment on proposal for elevation requests to development
Request for comments
Need
At present, if a support engineer has exhausted all avenues of investigation and they require further assistance they reach out to the back-end development teams via the various Slack channels. This approach raises the following issues and concerns:
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This is an informal and untracked pathway for an engineer to elevate an issue.
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It provides no consistency in the content or structure of requests that are made to the back end team
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The current voluntary basis by which a member of the slack channel (support or development) provides help introduces the risk of items being left with either a slow response or no response.
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As we continue to grow, the slack channels become increasingly noisy and this impacts the ability to scale the current approach
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A lot of useful debugging information resides in slack which is then deleted after 90 days meaning that valuable reusable information is lost
Approach
To address these problems I propose that we provide support engineers with a documented pathway to elevate tickets or any support-related requests that they are unable to progress, this new approach is not intended to completely replace slack communication in the channels but to offer a more formal elevation process when the need arises.
The proposed solution is to dog food and use GitLab issues as the basis for supporting a new workflow. This workflow would be broken down into the following issues:
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Create a new GitLab project and use issues to track help requests from support engineers to senior engineer
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Create templates to assist support engineers to collect useful information (gather the necessary logs, have exhausted doc troubleshooting suggestions) prior to creating an issue.
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Create a new workflow process where support engineers can elevate tickets/problems to a senior support engineer for assistance. This process has already been raised in the following issue: Idea: create a 'Ticket Help' project to get help with tickets!:
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Liaise with development management to get buy-in so we can create a new workflow that enables senior engineers to elevate issues to development if they are unable to progress the issue.
- This new workflow for example would include elevation to the appropriate development manager who then assigns the ticket to a specialist back end engineer
- Agree on reasonable SLO’s to enable support to set expectations with customers
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Work with the support ops team so issues can be linked to tickets in Zendesk and vice versa. We would also require labels to ensure issues are tracked accordingly.
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Create a workflow and/or macro so that when issues are closed any reusable information is added to the docs.
Benefit
The principal benefits are:
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There will be a clear pathway for engineers to obtain assistance for challenging tickets, this should reduce stress and increase collaboration between support engineers and developers.
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We will have a central searchable issue repository where valuable debugging information will be stored.
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If development help is required then we will have clear SLO's, ensuring that support engineers get help in a timely fashion and tickets are progressed quicker.
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This is a scalable and reportable solution.
Competition / Alternatives
- Continue to use the informal slack approach
- Use a third-party issue tracking tool
- Investigate if Zendesk can be used to elevate tickets to development