Ownership and boundaries - Editor Extensions

Context

Multiple groups contribute to features exposed through our editor extensions. This can create ambiguity regarding ownership and maintenance responsibilities. This document outlines an agreed-upon approach for consistent ownership attribution, aligning expectations and improving efficiency among all involved parties.

Owning a system part means being responsible for feature development, bug-fixes, and general maintenance of the affected part. Ideally, a team has maintainers in the system part they own to be more independent of the editor extensions team, but this is not a strict requirement.

System overview

Currently, the external features being integrated via our Editor Extensions follow this architecture:

• UI component built on gitlab-ui
• Integration with Editors: Webview
  • Webview is a web page shown in the editor
• Integration with Editors: Business logic
  • Business logic represents the editor-specific integration (e.g. TypeScript and VS Code Extension API, Kotlin and JetBrains Plugin API)

Legacy Ownership model

Currently used by Duo Chat:

Ownership model for features implemented in Language Server

Process of notifying others

• When a team starts working on a feature that will require Editor Extensions support:
  • PM/EM will notify Create:Editor Extensions group’s PM/EM - this allows the team to forecast the capacity necessary to support in the near future
• Feature implementation
  • Legacy ownership model (Duo Chat implemented separately in all extensions)
    • When the UI of the feature is ready:
      • the authoring team opens an integration MR
      • The Create:Editor Extensions group will assign an engineer to take over the MR and complete integration
    • Language Server ownership model
      • When the Language Server change is done, the feature team will notify Create:Editor Extensions group and they’ll integrate the language server change to the editor extensions.

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