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Discussion: The future of Quality and QA terms

Quality and QA(Quality Assurance) are currently used to describe multiple things and are ambiguous and outdated after the last two reorgs. They're used for e2e specs, e2e framework, the Developer Experience stage, SETs, gitlab-qa, etc. Is the general consensus that Quality/QA be renamed to Developer Experience(or DX) when referring to the stage and E2E when referring to specs? Here are some specific examples:

While looking into updating the terminology and handbook links in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/release/docs/-/blob/master/runbooks/resolving-qa-failures.md to better align with the recent reorg I ran into many questions:

  • Resolving QA Failures Should QA Failures change to E2E failures here to align with e2e-run-enviroment Slack channels and various other changes of referring to pipelines as E2E instead of QA? If so, should these changes be implemented as well: Deployment QA Pipeline -> Deployment E2E Pipeline, qa-smoke -> e2e-smoke, notify-slack-qa-success -> notify-slack-e2e-success?

  • Quality on call schedule -> Should this be Developer Experience on call schedule or SET on call schedule?

  • /chatops run quality dri schedule -> should this command be renamed to run set dri schedule(that makes it sound like you're setting the dri schedule), run developer experience dri schedule, or run dx dri schedule? (also depends on the answer to the previous question)

  • Quality owns the process of analyzing, determining the root cause and fixing a broken QA spec - This is still true for now but will it also be in the future when developers are responsible for e2e specs? Should Quality be replaced with SETs or Developer Experience here?

  • Feature Flag - Should the GitLab QA Bot be renamed to GitLab E2E Bot, or GitLab DX Bot?

  • (Q)A Users Being Blocked - Should QA users be renamed to E2E users?

  • Quality Test Group - Should sandbox groups such as gitlab-qa-sandbox-group-n be renamed to gitlab-e2e-sandbox-group-n?

Further thoughts:

  • Should the code in qa/ and the folder itself be renamed to e2e/? QA::Resource::Group -> E2E::Resource::Group

  • There's also the Quality and QA labels that need renaming. Any suggestions?

/cc @gl-dx

Edited by Désirée Chevalier