Design visionary mock-ups for the CI/CD templates experience
🧩 Problem
Authoring a pipeline has a significant learning curve which is frustrating for individual developers and costly for the enterprise organizations. Big part of CI/CD onboarding involves starting with a CI template and manipulating it based on what your project needs and what your company workflows and standards are.
Once you've set up a basic pipeline, you run into the next set of problems, like how to extend the pipeline functionality further while keeping your config as simple as possible and ideally without having to proactively learn about it?
Several specific problems around the templates experience that stood out to us during the problem validation interviews were:
- GitLab templates aren't discoverable and are difficult to get started with
- We don't differentiate job and pipeline templates that are meant to be used as the backbone of the main pipeline, or part of that pipeline as an include
- Large companies that have centralized pipeline creation teams want a way to create and maintain libraries of various CI/CD templates and associated documentation.
🎨 Proposal
Enterprises want easy CI onboarding for their teams and compliance with their CI/CD standards and securit & compliance requirements. Individual developers want easily create a functional pipeline and move on to writing code.
Improving the way we create, present and use CI/CD templates in GitLab is critical to improving CI onboarding for individual developers and large enterprise customers alike.
User personas
- Devon
- Priyanka
- Sasha
Next Steps
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Design a visionary direction for the flow of onboarding onto CI/CD using pipeline and job templates, as well as GitLab's other authoring tools. These mock-ups can be used to facilitate a Think Big session and validate our ideas with customers and internally. -
Gather feedback internally.