GitLab GitLab Group Kickoffs - Verify:Pipeline Execution (formerly known as CI), 4 Aug 2022

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From YouTube: GitLab 15.4 Kickoff - Verify:Pipeline Execution

Description

Kickoff Page: https://about.gitlab.com/direction/kickoff/#verify
Ops Direction: https://about.gitlab.com/direction/ops/#verify

Issues Discussed:
- Make it easier to understand and differentiate Merge request and merge result pipelines- https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/217718
- Bug Fix for Scheduled Pipelines - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/338609
- Improve sub-text for auto-merge label in merge widget - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/359057
- Frontend: UI updates when max jobs reached: - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/329926
- Performance Insights Feedback - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/365902

We love feedback and you can reach me at jheimbuck@gitlab.com or mention me on GitLab.com using @jheimbuck_gl

A

Welcome to the verify pipeline execution 15 for kickoff, my name is james heimbuck, product manager for the pipeline execution group here at gitlab. As a reminder, this group is responsible for get lab, ci pipelines, pipeline processing, as well as the category of merge trains I'm joined today by the pipeline execution product designer vitica.

A

You will find a link to the 154 kickoff page with links to all the items we're going to talk about today, as well as the verify stage direction page with discussion of our future work. In the comments below the video. You can always reach me at jheimbuk, gitlab.com or tagging me in a comment on any items with the pipeline or the group pipeline execution label in the gitlab project.

A

So during the 154 milestone, which I'm sharing my screen looking at our planning issue, the theme for our group is to improve the developer experience when troubleshooting pipelines. So we have a couple of goals for that. Our first goal is always is to meet our reliability issue. Slos um we're still labeling those with the verify p1 label uh and in this sprint or this milestone.

A

Rather, uh we only have two of those, so we're pretty excited that we've been able to continue to burn down and meet those slos that we don't have a bunch of things with missed slo that are reliability related. So a lot of the issues we're going to talk about today are in the verified p2.

A

So our second goal is to close out some of the bugs that make troubleshooting pipeline errors easier for developers, so the ones that we're looking at are first making it easier to understand and differentiate, merge request pipelines.

A

So this is a backend issue and we're going to wrap up the front end issue in the next milestone, but you can see the changes that we're going to make with the labels of better understanding, making it clear what that language means and what's in that pipeline, what that pipeline ran against in relation to the merge request, the source branch and the target branch. So we're excited for that change.

A

The second one is a bug fixing scheduled pipelines that are triggering multiple times. We think we have a good idea about what might be causing this, and so the team is ready to dig in and really get this fixed. We know it's impacting us internally, as well as customers externally.

A

So those two things are the goals for us in meeting that theme of making it easier to troubleshoot pipelines and now I'll hand it over to vitica to talk about some upcoming usability improvements that the team's exploring for later this year.

B

Thanks james, so some of the improvements that I am focusing on on the design work. Of course, um the first one is this, and I would talk a little about like why this is very relevant and very important for us to get to so a few milestones ago, uh I shared about a validation research that we ran around the concept that we called auto merge.

B

Now what that will do is it would simplify how we handle complex features such as um merge strain measurement pipeline, succeeds and like when these two work together, so it would make things much more simpler in the ui. Now this milestone, we are moving a step closer towards our goal by working on this issue that you're looking at right now and research informed us that you would like us uh like for us to provide you with a more clear status of what's going to happen when you click on uh like set emergency to auto merge.

B

So we are going to be improving the copy here, a bit and once that is done, yeah then we'll be all set to implement auto merge and I'm really excited for that, because that would be that's going to be like a big usability improvement on this front.

B

And the next one is a pretty simple one. So what's happening is sometimes there are very high number of jobs in a pipeline, and when that happens, uh I mean infrastructure wise, it's difficult to handle those, and that leads to a lot of failures. So we, while we are working on a backend issue for this to kind of put a cap on the number of jobs that one can create in a stage.

B

Apart from that, what needs to be done on the ui is that we need to be thoughtful of when users would uh kind of like at what places, and in what situations do we need to communicate it to our users on the ui uh that there's a limit? Does the cap do how many jobs they can have in our state?

B

So this is the issue that would take care of that, and apart from this um there's just like a few validations that will be running this milestone, and one of them is something that I spoke about.

B

I think in the previous kickoff video and that's about creating uh like allowing users to set up quota to their ci cd minutes usage for the projects which are directly under the namespace.

B

um We have the designs now and we'll be speaking to users to see like what the reactions are like and if uh we can get more feedback to improve the designs and that's it from the design side. That's awesome.

A

All right we're so excited for 15 4, and I will remind you that we're still collecting feedback on the performance, insights, experiment that is running I'll link to our feedback issue and overview video of that experiment in the comments below as well.

A

So if any of these issues are interesting to, you feel free to tag me or email, jheimbuck, gitlab.com thanks so much.