Epic Work Items Migration

Stage Working Group for Epics to Work Items migration plan and status

Epics to Work Items conversion plan and status

Attributes

Property Value
Date Created 2023-10-02
Target End Date 2024-07-12
Slack #s_plan, #f_work-item, #g_product_planning (only accessible from within the company)
Google Doc Agenda (only accessible from within the company)
Epic &9290
Overview & Status See Exit Criteria Progress

Context

Plan stage is developing Work Items as a platform to build GitLab features like Issues, Epics, Tasks, etc. to be more extensible to meet product needs. This working group is focused on the migration of Epics to Work Items and provides detailed insight on individuals involved in the effort, the technical plan for the migration, as well as current status and exit criteria.

Weekly Sync

WG members meet for sync call every Thursday at 14:30 UTC to discuss the actions taken since last call as well as steps for next week, meeting is recorded and publicly shared in GitLab Unfiltered YouTube channel.

Exit Criteria

Updates are being tracked in &11777 (updated every Monday).

This Working Group has the following exit criteria:

  1. A working Epic Work Item Type is available to all customers running the latest version of GitLab.
  2. The implementation does not create significant scaling or saturation risks for at least 6 months, and does not block feature development.
  3. A plan is in place to clean up technical debt within 6 months.

Stage 1 - Achieving Feature Parity between Epics and Work Items

Task Progress DRI (group or individual)
Add native support for work items at group-level 90% Project Management
Add support for relating work items based on different relationship types 100% Product Planning
Add support for relating legacy issues as children to work items 90% Product Planning
Add support for cross-group hierarchies in Hierarchy widget 100% Product Planning
Start and Due date inheritance support in Work Items 60% Kassio Borges (BE) & Himanshu Kapoor (FE) - Knowledge
Roll-up statistics around children count, weight sum, and health status in Hierarchy widget 5% Project Management
Add support for Ancestor widgets

Stage 2 - Epics data migration plan

Task Progress DRI (group or individual)
Block widgets which will be unavailable for migrated Epics
Setup synchronization between Epics table and Work Items table in database
Setup synchronization of widgets data between Epics and Work Items along with handling change in Epic Work Item ID
Introduce Work Item Epic creation ability at Group level

Stage 3 - Post-migration roll-out preparation

Task Progress
Ensure REST API interoperability with migrated Epics
Determine migration strategy for unique ID and IID of migrating epics to ensure that stale reference redirect
Database cleanup for stale columns and implementation logic of legacy Epics

Roles and Responsibilities

Working Group Role Work Stream/Specialism(s) Person Title
Facilitator & Functional Lead Backfilling (3) Alexandru Croitor Senior Backend Engineer, Plan:Project Management
Functional Lead Q4 Facilitator Kushal Pandya Fullstack Engineering Manager, Plan:Product Planning
Functional Lead Feature Parity (1) Eugenia Grieff Senior Backend Engineer, Plan:Product Planning
Functional Lead Syncing (2) Felipe Artur Senior Backend Engineer, Plan:Optimize
Functional Lead Delegation (4) Nicolas Dular Staff Backend Engineer, Plan:Product Planning
Functional Lead Create legacy epics for WI epics (5) Mario Celi Backend Engineer, Plan:Project Management
Functional Lead Customer Pilot (6) Heinrich Lee Yu Staff Backend Engineer, Plan:Project Management
Member Kassio Borges Staff Backend Engineer, Plan:Knowledge
Member Himanshu Kapoor Senior Frontend Engineer, Plan:Knowledge
Member Adam Hegyi Staff Backend Engineer, Plan:Optimize
Member Coung Ngo Senior Frontend Engineer, Plan:Project Management
Member Florie Guibert Senior Frontend Engineer, Plan:Product Planning
Member Rajan Mistry Frontend Engineer, Plan:Product Planning
Member Abhilash Kotte Sr Full Stack Engineer, Plan:Product Planning
Member Donald Cook Fullstack Engineering Manager, Plan:Project Management
Member Gabe Weaver Senior Product Manager, Plan:Project Management
Member Amanda Rueda Senior Product Manager, Plan:Product Planning
Member Jacki Bauer Product Design Manager, Plan