Deprecate backstage and improve work categorization and throughput types

Objective

Improve the MR Type tracking to improve attribution to Throughput type by deprecating and remove ~backstage which is currently being used as a catch all.

Plan

• 2020-06-29 - Communicate in #product, #eng-managers - @kwiebers
• 2020-06-30 - Communicate in #development - @kwiebers
• 2020-07-08 - Merge gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com!53571 (merged) - @kwiebers
• 2020-07-08 - Deprecate ~backstage on gitlab-org - @kwiebers
• 2020-07-08 - Update triage-serverless nudging automation to be all gitlab-org - gitlab-org/quality/triage-serverless#38 (closed) - @rymai
• 2020-07-08 - Communicate in #development, #eng-managers, #product - @kwiebers
• 2020-07-08 to 2020-07-24 - Measure Throughput type population rate and report back - @kwiebers

Background

~backstage is generally unclear due to its current catch-all nature. backstage is historically 36-40% of the overall product MR population and it is not easy to identify further detail from ~backstage.

Some of the examples we have found where ~backstage is applied which makes it challenging to account for the changes:

• Early foundational feature work would not be counted towards ~"feature"
• e2e test case creation in support of features (new or existing) are generally tracked with ~backstage
• Engineering workflow, pipeline and release tooling changes from other ~backstage changes

Danger encouraged this behavior by warning that there is no Changelog for an MR and directing to ~backstage which has been changed with gitlab-org/gitlab!30514 (merged).

Proposal

• Update handbook throughput guidance for ~backstage: gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com#7865 (closed) => gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com!53571 (merged)
• Create handbook guidance and snippets for reporting in Sisense and Insights by Throughput type: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/quality/team-tasks/-/issues/528 => gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com!53571 (merged)
• Create new labels and deprecate ~backstage: gitlab-org/quality/triage-ops#482 (closed)
  • featureaddition
  • ~"feature::maintenance"
  • ~"tooling::pipelines"
  • ~"tooling::workflow"
• Add triage reaction rule: gitlab-org/quality/triage-serverless#33 (closed) => gitlab-org/quality/triage-serverless!20 (merged)
  • Replace ~backstage with a replacement sub-type and direct to handbook
  • Apply top level type labels based on sub types
• Remove Deprecated ~backstage label: gitlab-org/quality/triage-ops#483

Nice to dos

• Update danger references to ~backstage: gitlab-org/gitlab#219751 (closed)
• Update danger references to backstage in Gitaly, charts, version-gitlab-com, customers-gitlab-com etc.: gitlab-org/gitlab#225308 (closed)

Analysis

Engineering Productivity believes that ~backstage is not the most appropriate label 40% of the time that ~backstage is applied:

• ~feature - 28% based on api Architecture decision deprecation ~enhancement feature flag ~performance Stuff that should Just Work technical debt test UI polish QA
• ~tooling - 11% based on Danger bot ci-build single codebase ~"dependency update" ~"Style decision" ~railsx.y labels
• ~bug - 0.5% based on regression
• documentation - 1.5% based on docs-only ~"docs-fix" Technical Writing development guidelines

Sisense charts

• Product MRs by Type
• Backstage MRs - this looks at MRs that only have ~backstage as a throughput label and identifies relevant other labels which indicate what type of change it may be.
• Other Backstage MRs