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GitLab.com Releases View

Problem to solve

GitLab.com releases more frequently (up to twice a week), versus our monthly self-managed releases (22nd of the month).

While we post a monthly release blog for our self-managed release, there is not a view for GitLab.com where customers can go and view the changes that have been recently rolled out (feature, explanation, link to issue, date/time released). There is also no view for customers to be informed on upcoming features.

Customers find it hard and sometimes rather frustrating that their GitLab.com instance looks different day to day (Or worse, a new feature breaks their old process). They want to be informed on what has been recently deployed and have some lead time on what new features they should expect to hit GitLab.com.

Intended users

I believe this solution would be valuable to all users of GitLab.com

Further details

We have this page: https://about.gitlab.com/releases/gitlab-com/ but it does not provide details on when the feature was deployed to GitLab.com or what features will be deployed soon.

@jrreid also poked around gitlab-org MRs for a bit to assess if labeling is consistent enough to give a good idea of what’s just hit GitLab.com. It’s pretty overwhelming and I imagine even the most technical of stakeholders would have a hard time getting value from this:

It seems like canary is around 5 hours “ahead” of .COM, which is not a huge amount of lead time for customers.

Proposal

A page that users can subscribe to that displays all the recent features released to GitLab.com. Users would be able to learn about the feature, view the feature documentation, open the corresponding issue and view the date/time the feature was deployed.

This view would also include upcoming feature releases for GitLab.com. This would provide lead time for users in case a feature disrupts their current workflow.