Skip to content

Draft: Proposal: Exclude staging from our Change Management processes

Igor requested to merge change-management-staging-out-of-scope into master

Why is this change being made?

We currently consider staging within scope of Change Management. This policy was originally established in !65619 (merged).

We already have a rather heavy-weight change management process. We often require jumping through several hoops (e.g. getting approvals from managers, DBRE, EOC). This not only greatly impacts velocity, but it is also questionable whether we actually get any additional safety out of it.

While staging is an important part of our release process (deploy pipelines, QA), it does not serve any production traffic. It isn't a production environment.

Thus, I would like to start the conversation about reconsidering this policy, and possibly excluding staging from change management.

Author Checklist

  • Provided a concise title for this Merge Request (MR)
  • Added a description to this MR explaining the reasons for the proposed change, per say why, not just what
    • Copy/paste the Slack conversation to document it for later, or upload screenshots. Verify that no confidential data is added.
  • Assign reviewers for this MR to the correct Directly Responsible Individual/s (DRI)
    • If the DRI for the page/s being updated isn’t immediately clear, then assign it to one of the people listed in the Maintained by section on the page being edited
    • If your manager does not have merge rights, please ask someone to merge it AFTER it has been approved by your manager in #mr-buddies
  • If the changes affect team members, or warrant an announcement in another way, please consider posting an update in #whats-happening-at-gitlab linking to this MR
    • If this is a change that directly impacts the majority of global team members, it should be a candidate for #company-fyi. Please work with internal communications and check the handbook for examples.

Merge request reports