Enforce domain expert approval in critical CI areas
Problem to solve
The CI codebase represents a business critical part for our customers. We are responsible for maintaining high performance, quality and maintainability of CI.
There have been a number of changes (even recently) that have been merged affecting performance, quality and maintenance of critical aspects of CI. Many of these MRs were not reviewed neither merged by CI domain experts.
Today we use CODEOWNERS to suggest reviewers on any CI code but these approvals are optional and we tend to ignore them.
As CI is one of the most complex parts of GitLab codebase we need to have a stricter approval process with regards to changes affecting critical aspects of CI like pipeline creation, pipeline processing, job queueing, etc.
Proposal
Change the rules in CODEOWNERS related to Verify. Require approval for all backend files and keep optional approval for frontend files.
[Verify Backend] # required
# files here
^[Verify Frontend] # optional
# files here