Custom Tooling and Dogfooding
Developer Experience custom tooling and dogfooding practices
GitLab dogfoods extensively. The Developer Experience stage builds custom tooling to address GitLab functionality gaps, creating a valuable feedback loop between internal needs and product development.
Over the years, we’ve built custom tooling for missing GitLab features (triage-ops, test health management, CI observability, in-job metrics). This custom tooling generates custom data that’s not part of GitLab’s production database.
By integrating custom tooling as product features, we achieve:
- Features that benefit customers (if it helps us as customer zero, it likely helps others)
- Custom data becomes product data, available by default in visualizations
- Reduced technical debt from maintaining custom solutions
- Every improvement benefits both customers and internal teams
CI/CD Pipeline Observability
| Tool |
Purpose |
Repository |
Status |
Product Potential |
| CI Alerts |
Real-time alerting for pipeline failures and performance issues |
ci-alerts |
Active |
High - Could become native pipeline alerting |
| CI/CD Pipelines Observability |
Pipeline visualizer, failure categorization, CI log scraping for custom metrics, and comprehensive analytics requiring tests as first-class citizens and runner improvements |
Epic #22, Pipeline Visualizer, Failure Categories |
Active |
High - Requires runner epic and native test concept in product |
| Snowflake Observability |
Custom dashboards and analytics for GitLab.com operations and performance |
snowflake-dashboard-sql |
Active |
High - Could be integrated directly in product |
Triage and Issue Management Automation
| Tool |
Purpose |
Repository |
Status |
Product Potential |
| Triage Ops (Reactive) |
Real-time automated issue and MR triage using custom policies and reactive engine |
triage-ops |
Active |
High - Advanced real-time triage automation |
| Triage Ops (Scheduled) |
Scheduled triage operations including weekly team reports and batch processing |
triage-ops |
Active |
High - Could benefit many customers (for example, weekly team reports) |
| Tool |
Purpose |
Repository |
Status |
Product Potential |
| GitLab Roulette |
Intelligent reviewer assignment system that considers domain expertise, availability, and workload |
gitlab-roulette |
Active |
High - Core developer workflow improvement |
| GitLab Danger Files |
Standardized CI-based code review automation and policy enforcement |
gitlab-dangerfiles |
Active |
High - Demonstrates advanced merge request automation |
| Renovate Bot |
Automated dependency management across GitLab projects |
renovate-gitlab-bot |
Active |
High - Multiple teams built similar solutions, clear product need |
Test Health and Quality Management
| Tool |
Purpose |
Repository |
Status |
Product Potential |
| Flaky Tests Management |
RSpec report parsing from job artifacts, automated test behavior analysis, GitLab issue creation for test health tracking, and data pipeline to GCS/Snowflake |
gitlab_quality-test_tooling |
Active |
High - Native test results concept missing from product |
| Slow Tests Management |
RSpec profiling and analysis with custom frontend/backend for test performance insights |
RSpec profiling stats, gitlab_quality-test_tooling |
Active |
Medium - Built but limited team adoption/reaction |
Incident and Process Management
| Tool |
Purpose |
Repository |
Status |
Product Potential |
| Main Branch Broken Process |
Automated identification, incident management, response, and revert MR handling |
broken main branch workflow |
Active |
High - Critical workflow for maintaining stable main branches |
Data and Analytics Infrastructure
