GitLab Plan Stage, 19 Dec 2018

Previous Meeting Next Meeting

⏯

youtube image

►

From YouTube: GitLab DevOps Plan stage - Interesting features coming in 2019

Description

Child epics and flexible work breakdown structure
Custom fields
Custom workflow stages and workflow issue boards
Value stream analytics
Issue boards with burnup charts
Analytics dashboards

GitLab DevOps Plan stage vision and roadmap: https://about.gitlab.com/direction/plan

A

Name is Victor I'm, a product manager here at good lab and right now it's the end of December of 2018, as we finish off the year. I wanted to tell you some exciting features that we have planned in the coming year in 2019 in the planned stage of get labs.

A

So Gil lab is a single application for the complete develops lifecycle and one of those stages in that lifecycle is the planned stage, and that includes a lot of planning features such as agile portfolio management, project management, Kanban boards and and many others and I just wanted to spend a couple of minutes here to quickly go over some features that we have planned in 2019, so just around the corner. So on your screen, you see right here is what we're calling child epics or sub epics.

A

So this is going to ship in January 22nd, the very first release of 2019. So, as you can see in this mock-up here within an epoch, you can have not just issues belonging to the epic, but you can have epics as well. So, essentially, you can have epics of epics, so we're really excited to essentially give you a flexible work breakdown structure to do everything from initiatives, high level planning, ok, ARS goals. However, you want to use epics at these higher levels.

A

You can now do and break them down so that that's really exciting and I'm excited to ship that, as part of a first release in 2019 and we're going to build on that and for this work breakdown structure. You see, for example, in this screenshot here you'll be able to see whether it's an issue or an epoch.

A

You can see its parent object, so an issue you can see its parent, epic and so on and so forth, and what will even have is will even have issues of issues in 2019, so the the you'll have this maximal flexible work breakdown structure where you can go all the way from a really high level, epic, all the way down to an issue. So that's what we're showing here and on the roadmap side, once you have epic of epics, how do we display that in the roadmap view? This is initial?

A

Mock-Up of that I'm, but the idea is that you can see when you click on an epic bar in the roadmap. You can see the child epics and you can click, keep clicking down and then so you'll be able to see everything in a timeline based view which, which we think it will be very powerful for those use cases in project management, portfolio management when you're getting to those director level, executive level use cases. So we're really excited about that.

A

This is yet another view of how those sub epics or child epics would behave, and you can see in this concept of this design here you can even see a portion of the roadmap view inside the epic page itself. You know this is popping in here, so really excited of some of these design. Concepts that we already have this is would be the the the issues the child issues I was talking about earlier.

A

Another feature that I'm really excited about is something that customers have been asking for a very long time and that's custom fields. So the concept here is that at the project level, in later on that the group level, we want to allow teams to define custom fields, and so so the use case here in this mock-up here is that say for a example: you wanted to specify whether your feature belong to.

A

Maybe you are a developing a mobile platform and you have Android iOS, maybe even Windows, Phone and and so so you can specify those different operating systems, those mobile operating system per issue, and so that's something that maybe what makes sense natively inside your lab as a field, but it would make sense for people doing mobile development, and so we won't extend that flexibility as a custom field.

A

For for folks to do, and so another field might be, you know, like a finance field, saying something this features: capitalizable weather, yes or no, and then so something like this so so these are, these are concepts or the custom field is the idea that we really want to ship in 2019. We've have a lot of deep conversations, technical conversations already and and at the end of this video I'll point you to to everything to all those links that which you can. You can see further custom workflows per group.

A

So this is a long side with custom fields. We want to allow teams to do custom, workflows and so right now, essentially, what you have it with issue state says you have a closed state and an open state with every single issue and seam with ethics right, open or closed, as you can see here so with custom workflows, you want to extend that. We want to make give a little bit more power to that and so right now you can do that with issue boards.

A

I mean you can use labels to represent workflows, but we want to make that a truly first-class native feature inside gitlab, and so what we're going to do is in the introduce the concept of custom workflows so that, even though an issue will always still be open or closed in state within the say, the open state, you might have additional what we call you know, stages or workflow States. We know we have to figure out and decide on a name, but in this particular example is here.

A

It could be ready in development and review, or maybe in UAT and so on and so forth. So the idea is you, you define this in your particular team and what this opens up to is something really powerful, because once you've designed designed your custom workflow in your particular group level, you can apply that inside a group issue board. So you can create a group issue board and it would automatically inherit those stages that you've pre-configured at the group level and so now you're using a workflow using an issue board.

A

A group level issue board for the purpose of workflow and everything is designed for you or defined for you already. These lists here would be created automatically. You just create the board, you specify it's a workflow born and good lab, but populate those lists for you automatically.

A

You can drag those issues through one by one in the you know, a very typical Kanban board, and now it's all already integrated with those custom, workflow States, and once you have that two, that we want to take it to the next level and analyze that the time that you know an issue isn't ready for a dev in development in QA. We want to analyze how much time it inside each station and how long it takes in the total cycle, because we want to provide that information to you as a team.

A

So you can focus in and say a which particular area is is taking a lot of time, and so the industry is calling that value stream mapping or value stream analytics, and so our concept here is that say say you are in a particular team, say the platform team and you're already working with a workflow board, as I showed here. That is in turn that was pre defined by your custom, workflow stages and Gill lab would tell you, oh your total cycle time in these months.

A

You know depth here in April and then going up in May and back down in June, and you can see these stages whether it went up or down, but what's really crucial is that these stages are not something predefined by kit lab it's something that your specific team has has said that it is relevant to you as a workflow stage in your particular workflow. So this is something very powerful that we're aiming to ship in 2019 and I'm really really excited about that.

A

Taking that further, as I mentioned earlier, we want to give you even more flexibility and say like an issue, you know, is it in development or is it blocked? Is it stuck? Is it an idle phase and we will provide the automation or get labeled? No ok, an issue has not been touched for or 24 hours. That means it's idle and let's record that time and surface those metrics to you.

A

So so this is a visualization of how you might see it in a in a in an issue board now talking about issue boards, they're already pretty powerful in get lab, but we can do much much more and so we're planning to do a lot. I don't have a lot of time to get into every one of those details, but one really cool, visual, mock-up and design that we've already come up with is being able to edit issues while you're in the board itself.

A

So so the concept here is, you can see sort of hiding behind this little pain here there, your issue board and once you've click on this issue. This paint slides over from the right. So right now in if you're using get lab, you know when you click on issue. Just the sidebar appears, but now the entire issue- or you know the rest of the issue as it were, would slide in and you can interact with the issue. You can even create a new issue from here, but more pertinently.

A

You can you know, looking look at the description, you can look at the title. You can make changes to it. You can scroll down and add comments, so you can do everything that you would want, whilst inside an issue board. So we think this is very powerful for Team, say they're, doing scrum planning, they're they're planning, their sprints and they're they're doing a you know, reviewing issues and and the current sprint or the next sprint, or maybe they're in the middle of an iteration and they're.

A

Saying like oh this, this issue has changed, I want to make on change to it and you you throw your issue board and a projector to to a screen in your office and you're just clicking around, and you don't want to jump around to another browser tab.

A

You can do it directly on issue board, so this is something I'm personally very excited for as a design along the theme of analytics, as I showed you earlier, we already have burned down charts in gitlab and right now, they're scoped per milestone, which is already pretty awesome, but we want to take that further and scope it per board. So that concept is, you would haven't. You will have an issue board. You click a button and recall that you have these workflow stages here and now that you have these workflow stages.

A

We want to allow you to burn down those issues per this workflow stage and that's exactly the concept we have sketched out here. So you can see it's burning down or actually this burning up. So let me Oh nope, that's right!

A

This is burning down, so so your open issues are burning down, as you can see here, so whether it's issue count or weight, and you can see how it's going from in-depth in review and QA, and you can see that the remaining issue weight, which is equivalent to story points, say in agile or issue count and another way to do. Burden on charts are sort of the variation or a different.

A

Flavor of them are what are commonly known as burn up charts or cumulative flow diagrams and I want to go into detail why this might be even more powerful, but suffice it to say it's something where we're strongly considering as well and putting into issue boards, and you can see your your work being burned up or accumulating points as it were.

A

As you are finishing your sprint and you can see more and more issues are being closed during your sprint, as they're being moved from in Devon review and queuing and so on and so forth and again, the the story of today's video is that this is all customizable right. Your specific team is saying that we have an in-depth stage in review stage in QA stage and and good lab will allow you to show these visualizations based on that really excited about that analytics front.

A

We want to extend not just what I'm calling so so everything I've talked about previously with analytics in the you know, in the cycle time with with this time total cycle time or with these burndown charts, they're really focused on team based analytics sort of in the moment or or say across time, but they're focused on say for that particular month, but their team focused analytics and their focus on delivery, and so what we have as a separate concept, you know I'm still pretty related is analytics and we already have that actually inside gitlab right now.

A

So if you know this is live, get lab that I'm showing you- and we already have something called analytics here, and we have a single chart there right now, if you, if you navigate to it, but we're extending that concept in 2019 and adding a lot more charts to that particular page and giving you just generic analytics. So not just team analytics, which was very focused on on you, know: team delivery and execution, but just analytics in general how many issues are created per month. How many issues are closed?

A

How many merge requests are open and closed? What is the length and time of these merge requests? How you know? How long does it take a merge request to be? You know, completed from open to merge all these. We have planned in a lot more different types of charts, and we want to make that customizable again. That's you know the sort of the story today by creating dashboards.

A

So so right now, as I mentioned earlier, this particular page, as you see that's already live on, get lab comm is is, is a short only one single chart, but this will be providing a generic dashboard, so you can create as many charts as you wanted.

A

So that's pretty much I wanted to get to today, because there's there's a lot more I wanted to keep this video relatively short. But again, today, I've limited the discussion to the plan stage of the get of what the then DevOps lifecycle as we define it at gitlab, and so you can I get to what we call the direction page of all our stages.

A

Just by going to about Gil AB comm slash direction and have you do slash plan you'll get to the planned Direction page, and so you can see all the you know all the goodies here.

A

You can see all the links to all the issues that I've talked about so one you know top-down way to to find everything that I just talked about would be to click on this link, and this will bring you to that really cool roadmap you and I mentioned earlier, which shows you all the epics and from there you can dig down into all the planned features which is really exciting, and some of these are just these additional links or different ways that we are slicing and dicing upcoming planned features.

A

If you review this particular page, it's yet another way where we're thinking about the direction and the vision of the planned stage by grouping them by what we call category. So we have, you know a dropper for project management. We have, you know, govern workflows, values, treatment, streams, analytics requirements, management, quality management. So a lot more here that we didn't even cover today, but these are additional ways. We we've, we think about the plan vision.

A

So please please visit and look here the best way to give your feedback which which I would really love, and so that's how we actually shape a roadmap is by listening to feedback from you, the viewer and, if you're, a customer already using your lab or you're interested in using your lab, we would love to hear your feedback.

A

The best way to do that is to log on to get lab comm and start you just commenting on these issues, and then we find one of these issues and just jump in on these epics on issues and just start talking and a lot of people are already doing that. So if you haven't done that already sign up for a account on Gil lab comm I'll take you, you know literally two minutes and then start commenting right away. If you really don't want to do that, you can contact me directly.

A

You can email me at this email address Victor at the lab home and give me direct feedback and I'd love to to have a chat with you over a video call or just trade emails, but we really want your feedback, and so this is just a taste of what's coming in 2019 and if you share with us your feedback and what you think is important. That could very well change, and so that's what we want to do. So, thank you for listening and watching and please reach out and give us some more feedback. Thank you.