Merge Request Performance
Documents/artifacts/sources of truth
- Sisense Dashboard
- Discussion Guide
- Recruiting Info
- Recruiting Request
- Prior Customer Interviews
- Known MR issues by Code Review team and UX Design team
- Prioritization of known MR issues
- Code Review Master Synthesis
- Dovetail project with findings and recommendations
What’s this issue all about?
In the last NPS survey, we got a significant amount of negative feedback on Merge Request performance. We don't get that same feedback internally, and we'd like to know why.
What hypotheses and/or assumptions do you have?
Our hypothesis is that our customers use GitLab MRs differently than we do, and that can impact the performance they experience. For example, internally, our goal is to submit the smallest possible MR. Also, we release every month, which limits the amount of comments that are generally associated with an MR.
What questions are you trying to answer?
- Do self-managed customers have a different experience with MR performance than those on GitLab.com?
- For companies with poor MR performance, how do they structure their work? Continuous Deployment? Agile (frequent deploys)? Waterfall? (deploys after months of work)?
- For companies with poor MR performance, how many comments on average do their MRs have?
- How much of the perceived poor MR performance is due to usability problems like interaction patterns?
Core questions
Additional questions
Relevant comments from survey
- "Its pretty good overall. A bit slow sometimes.
- Everything is excellent but the website's response time - if I navigate through files or larger MRs waiting times become a problem
- ...Also, we've been having some rather serious performance issues, uptime issues, and problems with Gitlab rendering large merge requests, which I never saw on Github.
- Bad performance. Especially when dealing with large merge requests or files
- GitLab is a great product. The only thing that really bothers me on a daily basis is performance. At least once a day I experience issues with the platform where MRs pages show errors, pipelines pages take a while to update, etc.
- "Performance. Otherwise a great tool. Just slower than i would like given the complexity.
- show MR page is slow to load, searching through MRs requires a you to click, and then press enter - that's slow, searching through MRs is slow in general, would be nice to be able to click the Pipeline status notifications and get directly into that notification's associated show MR page
- One thing that is very very annoying is if the git diff is wrong. This happens especially for long-running MRs where master is merged in a couple of times. But if we cant rely on the git diff, what's the point of an MR?"
- nope, at times the "changes" in MR is taking too much time to load in the UI (when the changes are more than 60). Just a feed back.
What persona, persona segment, or customer type experiences the problem most acutely?
Developers
What business decisions will be made based on this information?
We'll work with PM to prioritize MR performance improvements based on the results.
Edited by Lorie Whitaker