Dogfood Plan Working Group

This working group will integrate new Plan stage features in GitLab’s own agile planning process.

Attributes

Property Value
Date Created August 1, 2020
Date Ended December 15, 2020
Slack #wg_dogfood_plan (internal only)
Google Doc Dogfood Plan Working Group Agenda (internal only)

Business Goal

This working group will integrate new Plan stage features in GitLab’s own agile planning process. Additionally, there may be some existing features we can consume. We would start with the Plan stage group itself, asking the people who are responsible for the features to implement their usage locally. Assuming success we might roll this out further across R&D (other stages) in a future iteration. The benefits we hope to achieve are:

  • Our current process is not standardized and some teams are probably planning releases in a sub-optimal (not efficiently, transparently, async, etc) because they are not benefitting from what other teams have figured out works well
  • Dogfooding
    • If we’re going to standardize on a tool it should be our own product
    • It’ll make the product better for users/customers
  • This will reiterate to the team, users, and customers how invested we are in our own planning feature set while GitLab also integrate with other planning tools because they are entrenched in customer organizations

Exit Criteria

Roles and Responsibilities

Working Group Role Person Title
Facilitator Tim Zallmann Director of Engineering
Development Department Lead Donald Cook Frontend Engineering Manager
UX Department Lead Mike Long Product Design Manager
Quality Department Lead Ramya Authappan Quality Engineering Manager
PM Division Lead Jeremy Watson Group Manager, PM
Member Gabe Weaver Senior Product Manager
Member Keanon O’Keefe Senior Product Manager
Member Mark Wood Senior Product Manager
Member John Hope Backend Engineering Manager
Member Jake Lear Backend Engineering Manager
Executive Sponsor Christopher Lefelhocz VP of Development

Artifacts

  • The plan team and a couple more are actively using Iterations at the moment
  • A clear understanding of what works and what doesn’t was generated around the feature
  • Keeping the dogfooding activity rolling we have agreed to keep a biweekly work meeting while we introduce Epic swimlanes through tutorial videos, office hours and announcements
Last modified June 27, 2024: Fix various vale errors (46417d02)