GitLab Pipeline Insights Group, 8 Jul 2021

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From YouTube: Handling Error Budgets and Tech Debt

Description

The Verify:Testing group documented (https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/development/ops/verify/testing/#error-budget-issues) how they handle prioritizing issues that may come from review of the Error Budget dashboard and how this works with prioritization of Technical Debt and features.

A

Hey I'm james hembach, the product manager for the testing group in the verify stage and scott hampton is with me as well. Scott want to introduce yourself real, quick.

B

Yep scott, hampton the acting engineering manager for the verified testing stage.

A

And we just wanted to record a quick walkthrough. We had recently merged, mr mr to our team, page talking about air budget issues and updating a little bit are prioritizing technical debt, and this is in how we plan uh on the page. I wish I'm not sharing my screen. Why don't I do that? So everyone can see what I'm looking at on our team page. uh We have some great documentation about how we work both planning and workflow, within the planning section.

A

We'd previously had prioritizing technical debt and engineering manager, and I and scott- and I have talked about- we always want to have about 20 of our issues, be technical debt, which we label as a feature maintenance item.

A

We don't consider bugs technical debt, but it's always work that the team wants to do to better make the code just work better, make our systems work better and then recently, we've taken on this error, budgeting methodology of keeping track of things uh scott. You want to talk through that a little bit and how we're using the error, budgets and our slos.

B

Absolutely the air budget dashboard is a way to view our general availability for all of our endpoints and whether they're erroring out or whether they're too slow. We have a certain amount of availability allotted to our team, so the our goal is.

B

I will review that budget dashboard uh weekly on a weekly basis, if, if we are spending too much, if we're going over our budget, we'll I'll be looking through to see which endpoints are causing, that and researching and and creating an issue for um fixing that and improving that endpoint in any way, and then we'll prioritize that accordingly, whether how much uh um their budget is being taken up from that endpoint and prioritize it accordingly to our technical debt.

A

Yep and we have on the up section, um pi review page, uh a section about our error budget and our technical debt last I looked we're at 99.98 availability, so we're above our target of 99.95 three nines.

A

uh So so far, things are working great um and, as we run into issues we'll pull those in and prioritize those uh those might end up, bumping other stuff out of a milestone, but we'll probably follow our usual cadence of create the issue, pull it into the next milestone and let the team continue to focus on what they're currently working on as long as it's not a severity one issue.

A

So that's how we're going to be handling error, budget and prioritizing our technical debt in the testing group. Thanks.

A