Scheduling issue for the 12.8 release

Product priorities

The groupdistribution roadmap is starting to move closer to reality as we make greater use of epics. Timelines for some epics need tweaking. Over time my hope is that this becomes a highly accurate picture of the major areas of focus for the team and priority order for delivering customer value so that internal and external stakeholders can more easily provide feedback.

Automating HA and Geo

Make progress towards automating the creating and configuration of a Geo primary and secondary with HA. Sync with the Geo team to identify opportunities for collaboration and avoid duplication of effort. The MVP is to meet the needs of the Geo team so they can quickly configure environments for testing purposes. By the end of this milestone we should try to have automation tooling that we can hand off to the Geo team for testing. cc @rnienaber @fzimmer

PM interviews with customers to learn more about customer needs for automating HA and Geo.

PostgreSQL updates

By GitLab 13.0 we aim to drop support for PostgreSQL 9.6 and 10.0, bundle PostgreSQL 11 as opt out, and include PostgreSQL 12 as opt in. To achieve this, we should aim to have PostgreSQL 11 included as opt-in in %12.8 so that we have three releases in which to test and receive feedback before removing the earlier versions. This will be a major focus for 12.8 and we will likely need multiple engineers to contribute to this effort.

Cloud-native maturity

Over the first half of 2020 we will be focusing on moving our cloud-native installation from a Viable maturity level to a Complete maturity level. We should make incremental progress towards this with each monthly release. For %12.8 we have included an issue to add optional support for Puma in the charts to bring the cloud native install more in line with the options that are available in Omnibus.

Priority board

Priority board categorizes the importance of all open issues, regardless of milestone. It's useful when looking for issues to consider for scheduling. Board includes issues from Omnibus, Charts, Team tasks projects.

Scheduling board

For Scheduling board is a work board used specifically during the scheduling process to provide an overview of candidates and get an idea of the next release before assigning the milestone to issues. Board includes issues from Omnibus, Charts, Team tasks projects.

Status

  1. Collect initial candidate issues
  2. Issues added to the Deliverable board via label
  3. Scheduling boards sorted/arranged by importance
  4. Scheduling boards contain candidates from both Engineering and Product
  5. Scheduling boards scoped to a reasonable amount of work for the release
  6. Managers schedule the agreed issues for the release

/cc @gitlab-org/distribution

Edited by Steven Wilson