Gitlab Flow Docs - Adding Enablement Content for Customers Requiring Alternative Branching Strategies
Problem Statement
GitLab Flow Documentation provides justification for GitLab Flow and fails to provide how we can also meet other Git Flow methodologies.
Proposed Solution
Document how GitLab can be leveraged for other git flow methodology
Additional Context
I met with a financial industry subscriber using Gitlab Premium. They are using the GitLab Flow for their team members utilizing Gitlab, but approximately 2x the amount other developer users at their company are using competitive solutions because they had a perception that we do not support the git flow in Gitlab. Their most critical financial trading apps which their customers use require a very long, waterfall-development lifecycle style testing phase instead of the quick iterations of testing for each commit and MR characteristic of the GitLab Flow. They also require support for creating branches on branches on branches and hot-fixes characteristic of the git flow. This customer had a perception that we could not support this branch and testing strategy so they chose other vendors instead of Gitlab for those 300 developer users devops toolchain, and are now somewhat locked into those relationships and platforms due to the level of investment they sunk into the many integrations required to support their current tool chains, and how that's stabilized and settled as the status quo for their teams' workflows.
If we can indeed support git flow branch strategies as described above, then the suggestion is to add some enablement documentation for how the git flow could be implemented in Gitlab and utilized for customers, teams, and projects having a hard requirement for this.
The business case is that we could be missing out on customers with teams who could adopt Gitlab, but if we communicate how these alternative branching strategies can be used in Gitlab, then we could win more of their business.
Not sure where is the best location for this content, but my initial thought is mentioning that we do support git flow on this page where the git flow is discussed, and then a hyperlink that points to a separate section dedicated to enablement content for utilizing the git flow in Gitlab might do the trick.