Usability improvements for in-product roadmaps
Problem to solve
We currently use direction pages outside of GitLab instead of the in-product Roadmaps feature to show our roadmap for different stages. Roadmaps are missing some key functionalities that cause us to do this:
- Long lists are difficult to deal with, it requires a lot of mouse wheel scrolling and there are UI bugs (for example, the scrollbar is invisible when you look at the whole gitlab-org project.)
- It is not possible to show issues without epics in the same place as epics. If you're trying to see a roadmap of what we're delivering, it's important that standalone items are accounted for. These tend to represent important single deliverables.
- It is not possible to expand a epic and see the issues that are part of it. A "down arrow" to fold it down and show the sequencing of individual items would be cool, but there are also probably other UX solutions.
- It's not really clear using the roadmap what's going to ship when, which should be a focus point. Point 2 and 3 contribute to this, but the sort of generic feeling blue bars laid out as a dependenciless Gantt chart also does. Having the cursor not aligned to the current date also does. The roadmap seems to be optimized for how long things will take (width of blue bar) vs. when things become available, like our roadmap pages do.
I think filtering on direction would have the expected results, but without implementing point 2 yet I'm unsure.
It's not strictly required, but we also have direction pages for CI/CD for exmaple which are comprised of 3 stages. There is currently no way to build a query that will show ~"devops::release" OR devopspackage OR devopsverify. If you try to add all three, you don't match anything since the labels are mutually exclusive and it is treating them as an AND.
Intended users
Further details
- In-product roadmap for stage: https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/roadmap?scope=all&utf8=%E2%9C%93&state=opened&label_name[]=devops%3A%3Arelease
- Web roadmap view for stage: https://about.gitlab.com/direction/release/#upcoming-releases
- Web roadmap view for section: https://about.gitlab.com/direction/cicd/#whats-next-for-cicd
Proposal
Permissions and Security
Documentation
Testing
What does success look like, and how can we measure that?
Links / referencesrnal
Edited by Jason Yavorska