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Clarify maintainers' responsibility for Renovate MRs

Paul Gascou-Vaillancourt requested to merge renovate-maintainers-responsibility into master

Why is this change being made?

We recently found ourselves in a situation where a GitLab UI upgrade got blocked for 3 weeks: gitlab-org/gitlab!121070 (merged).

While this is rare, it's not the first time such an event occurs. These can cause significant delays, frustration and increases the risk incurred by finally merging the upgrade (gitlab-org/gitlab!121070 (merged) ended up bumping @gitlab/ui by 20 versions at once).

We would rather not make the release process more complex. We strongly believe that we can make the current workflow work. We might need to clarify the importance of those upgrades though. When being assigned to one of those MRs, it can be easy to consider them unimportant because:

  • They are created automatically.
  • The author is a bot.
  • We are picked randomly. We should not forget that behind this automated process, team members are still the ones that benefit from those upgrades.

Let's try to clarify what's expected of maintainers when they are assigned to those MRs. Hopefully we can prevent this situation from repeating itself with clearer guidelines rather than by complexifying the release process.

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, and the content is SAFE
  • 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
    • The when to get approval handbook section explains the workflow in more detail
  • 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.
Edited by Paul Gascou-Vaillancourt

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