Developer Experience

Mission

Accelerate GitLab’s engineering velocity while elevating quality standards by connecting teams, tools, and insights into a cohesive development ecosystem that works for everyone.

Request for Help Process

Create issues to request support through the RFH process below. This will allow us to prioritize requests against our planned project roadmaps.

• Please follow the instructions in the Request for Help project. Some teams in Developer Experience have their own Request for Help processes. If you are not sure where your request goes, please use the Developer Experience RFH project and we will route appropriately.
• Complete all sections of the template so we can quickly triage your request
• Developer Experience will triage the request within a week, adding appropriate labels and assigning team members based on the request type and priority.
• For more urgent requests please feel free to tag the management team above.

Project Management

All work is tracked in epics and issues. We follow the The Infrastructure Platforms Project Management processes

Starting a new project

Every project starts with an epic. Follow the Infrastructure Platforms epic guide to create a new epic with the required information. The epic description should give the context, project scope, and intended outcomes. Often the epic will be an iteration of a larger project.

• Every project should have a DRI assigned. The DRI is responsible for making decisions, maintaining the epic and issues, and providing the weekly epic status update.
• We aim to have more than one person working on each project to allow for knowledge sharing. On projects with a single thread of work, we can knowledge share by working across timezones. Talk to your EM about the best way for the team to collaborate on work.

Follow the steps on https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/gl-infra/epic-issue-summaries#child-epics to enable the weekly epic status automation used for Grand Reviews.

Completing a project

After the planned work is completed, follow the Infrastructure Platforms guide to finishing a project

DevEx Grand Reviews

Every Thursday, the DevEx Senior EM, and one of the DevEx EMs, or their delegates, record a DevEx Grand Review to walk through the projects that are in progress. The goal is to improve project visibility across the section. Top level epics are used to identify these projects.

Before Thursday 17:00UTC, DevEx EMs use the epic status updates to draft updates for the Friday Platforms Grand Review - internal link. The DevEx updates are finalized on the internal issue before the Friday Grand Review recording.

See the Platforms Grand Review handbook section for more details about the department approach

Developer Experience Demos

The DevEx section has internal sync demo calls scheduled for every other week. The goal of the demo calls is to build connections and share knowledge across the entire DevEx group.

People who want to demo something should add their name to the demo agenda sheet. Demos do not need to be polished or prepared in advance.

Please ping in the DevEx Slack channel if you would like to be added to the invite.

Team Structure

Infrastructure Platforms Department structure is documented in our handbook. |

Developer Experience group structure

graph TD
    DE[Developer Experience group]
    click DE "/handbook/engineering/infrastructure-platforms/developer-experience"

    DE --> AP[API]
    click AP "/handbook/engineering/infrastructure-platforms/developer-experience/api"
    DE --> DA[Development Analytics]
    click DA "/handbook/engineering/infrastructure-platforms/developer-experience/development-analytics"
    DE --> DT[Development Tooling]
    click DT "/handbook/engineering/infrastructure-platforms/developer-experience/development-tooling"
    DE --> FR[Feature Readiness]
    click FR "/handbook/engineering/infrastructure-platforms/developer-experience/feature-readiness"
    DE --> PE[Performance Enablement]
    click PE "/handbook/engineering/infrastructure-platforms/developer-experience/performance-enablement"
    DE --> TG[Test Governance]
    click TG "/handbook/engineering/infrastructure-platforms/developer-experience/test-governance"

Team Members

Management team

Name	Role
Amy Phillips	Senior Engineering Manager, DevEx
Paul John Phillips	Engineering Manager, Development Analytics / Feature Readiness
Mohga Gamea	Manager, Quality Engineering
Nadya Denisenko	Manager, Engineering
Marek Komor	Manager, Engineering

Teams

API

The following people are members of the API group:

Name	Role
Amy Phillips	Senior Engineering Manager, DevEx
Chance Feick	Staff Backend Engineer, Developer Experience:API
Max Woolf	Staff Backend Engineer, Developer Experience:API
Vlad Wolanyk	Backend Engineer, Developer Experience:API

Development Analytics

The following people are members of the Development Analytics group:

Name	Role
Paul John Phillips	Engineering Manager, Development Analytics / Feature Readiness
Andrejs Cunskis	Senior Software Engineer in Test, Development Analytics
David Dieulivol	Senior Backend Engineer, Development Analytics
Ievgen Chernikov	Senior Software Engineer in Test, Development Analytics
Pranshu Sharma	Intermediate Backend Engineer, Development Analytics
Lohit Peesapati	Intermediate Backend Engineer, Development Analytics

Development Tooling

The following people are members of the Development Tooling group:

Name	Role
Mohga Gamea	Manager, Quality Engineering
Backend Engineer	Backend Engineer
Manuel Schönlaub	Backend Engineer
Kev Kloss	Frontend Engineer
Matias Alvarez	Backend Engineer
Nao Hashizume	Backend Engineer
Peter Leitzen	Staff Backend Engineer, Engineering Productivity

Feature Readiness

The following people are members of the Feature Readiness group:

Name	Role
Paul John Phillips	Engineering Manager, Development Analytics / Feature Readiness
Alberto Bignotti	Backend Engineer Developer Experience, Feature Readiness
Richard Chong	Senior Software Engineer in Test, Developer Experience:Feature Readiness
Sofia Vistas	Senior Software Engineer in Test, Developer Experience, Feature Readiness

Performance Enablement

The following people are members of the Performance Enablement group:

Name	Role
Marek Komor	Manager, Engineering
Andy Hohenner	Senior Software Engineer in Test, Developer Experience, Performance Enablement
Brittany Wilkerson	Senior Software Engineer in Test, Developer Experience, Performance Enablement
John McDonnell	Senior Software Engineer in Test, Developer Experience, Performance Enablement
Nivetha Prabakaran	Software Engineer in Test, Developer Experience, Performance Enablement
Vishal Patel	Software Engineer in Test, Developer Experience, Performance Enablement

Test Governance

The following people are members of the Test Governance group:

Name	Role
Nadya Denisenko	Manager, Engineering
Désirée Chevalier	Senior Software Engineer in Test, Test Governance
Joy Roodnick	Software Engineer in Test, Test Governance
Tim Beauchamp	Software Engineer in Test, Test Governance
Will Meek	Senior Software Engineer in Test, Test Governance

View page source - Edit this page - please contribute.