Form working group for 17.0 Major release
TL;DR
The Major release is coming up, there's a lot of coordination to manage cross functionally. We should form a temporary working group with stakeholders from each function to ensure a smooth transition for customers.
Context
- Major Release Date: 2024-05-16
- Cutoff for all deprecation announcements: 2024-02-14
- GitLab Releases Page
GitLab's major release date is coming up on 2024-05-16
. There is a large amount of coordination that is required to deliver a major release smoothly, in a way that maximises customer results and minimises internal toil and impact.
We have made material improvements to the experience around breaking changes, consolidating breaking changes into major versions and enhancing our deprecations page to make regular releases more predictable for customers.
However, large portions of our communications and coordination processes for the major release are still manual. There are additional complications tied to the fact that we continuously push changes to gitlab.com without a pre-defined schedule. This includes breaking change and is different from the more predictable, self-managed experience.
Proposal
We form a short-lived working group, with stakeholders from each relevant department/function that are responsible for disseminating messaging and managing required contribution in their area. The working group should look like:
- Working group lead -
@swiskow
- Executive Sponsor -
@joshlemos
- Stakeholders
- SaaS Platforms -
@fzimmer
,@marin
- Delivery -
@mbursi
- Dedicated -
@amyphilips
- Development -
@steve-evangelista @timzallmann
- Distribution -
@balasankarc
- Customer Success -
@mbruemmer
- Support -
@lyle
- Product -
@mflouton
- SaaS Platforms -
The working group should be dissolved after the major release is complete, with a target of the 17.1 release.
## Open Questions
- TBD