GitLab Pipeline Execution, 27 Jan 2021

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From YouTube: CI category direction update - Jan 2021

Description

Direction pages referenced in the video:
- https://about.gitlab.com/direction/verify/continuous_integration/
- https://about.gitlab.com/direction/ops/

A

Hi everyone, my name, is tal yeager. I am a gitlab product manager for verify continuous integration. I recently made some updates for the continuous integration category direction.

A

These are the updates for january 2021 and today, I'd like to walk through some of those updates, but before I do, I want to take a step back real, quick and talk through what our focus is at the stage level we're looking here at the um the ops section direction, handbook page and you'll see that verify is one of the five stages in the ops section.

A

Integration is one of the categories under verify. So when we take a look at what the focus for verify is um you'll see that our stage monthly, active user is a metric that we track and one of the things we monitor is unique: users triggering pipelines.

A

So obviously, continuous integration is in the thick of having features that would impact unique users, triggering pipelines and one of the things we want to focus on the next two quarters is doubling down on reducing our tech, debt and bug backlog specifically to improve our performance and usability for gitlab ci features.

A

Keeping that in mind.

A

We want to align with that stage level focus in ci, and so one of the updates I've made under the what's next, and why is to call out that we have a renewed focus on improving the uh the user experience in in resolving bugs and making usability improvements? So that's generally what we want to achieve. I called that a couple examples here. These aren't the only ones that will be working on, but they give you a flavor of the types of improvements.

A

We're looking at one of them is an improvement to give some kind of tagging or label of pipelines that were created by the merge trains process.

A

When you look at a list of pipelines for a given project uh or uh and you're, not the the type of pipelines that are created by the merge trains process is a slightly different than the behavior of those that are created with a commit or other types of of triggers and seeing a pipeline get cancelled and restarted because of the nature of how merge trains works could be a little concerning and having just a label that gives our customers a hint that hey this pipeline is part of the merchant's process at least gives them a better understanding and improves usability on the pipeline's list.

A

View page another type of improvement that we want to do for the sake of user experience, a better user experience is updating our ui messages to make them more informative. uh Let me click through to give you an example in this issue of what we're talking about in this issue.

A

We are wanting to improve on messaging such as this one. That's telling you next to the disabled, merge button that you can only merge once the items above are resolved.

A

Obviously, it's not very clear which these items are, and there is no items listed directly above so one way we can make the messaging more meaningful and helpful to our user are, in this case, changing it so that we call out specifically why you cannot merge and, and- and the copy here is, the merch request cannot be merged because no pipelines ran for the latest commit, so that not only helps our users uh self-help and knowing what to do next. It overall increase increases, improves user experience and usability of our our our uh feature.

A

So again, these are just a couple issues that represent our focus, but again the main focus is making ci features easier and more intuitive. To use. Another update I made in the direction page this month is a few updates on what the the highest, the top customer issues both for internal customers and our wider community customer.

A

But I did call out, in our maturity plan that, in addition to prioritizing important, p2 bugs and user experience improvements, we still want to continue designing and validating features that we want to implement as part of our our vision for the year and then part of our three-year focus. What you see here is links to the child. Epics of our one-year focus, epic, and um I hope you click through and see some of the design mock-ups for that.

A

But I talk a little more about what we're wanting to achieve in those three-year vision under the top vision section at the bottom of this direction page so generally, we just want to help our users better, monitor and understand their pipelines, so this could be being able to see more pipeline activities as the pipeline is running, such as durations for each job that have completed to actually having more intuitive ways to access the logs to troubleshoot.

A

What's going on so that they so that our users have that data to react to a pipeline that needs attention um and then there's a couple uh other vision items here that that is a focus for us, but that's pretty much the updates I've made for this month next month. When I make some new updates to ci category direction, we'll have an update for you, then thank you for listening.