Performance Enablement
Performance Enablement team within Developer Experience sub-department
Mission
To build and maintain a framework/developer portal which enables internal teams to develop reliable systems and deliver seamless customer experiences.
Vision
To transform GitLab’s performance testing from reactive to proactive while fostering a culture of performance awareness by providing:
- Optimized and efficient feedback loops
- Faster times between test execution and result analysis
- Enhance setup and execution process for performance testing
- Empower engineers to detect and prevent performance issues as early as possible
- Reduced cognitive load
- Improve documentation for better clarity and accessibility of performance testing best practices and available tooling
- Simplify complexity in tools and dashboards used for performance testing
- Improved flow state
- Define feature readiness at the performance level
- Ensure self-servicing of performing performance testing at the adequate layer of the SDLC
The first four pillars in our teams roadmap will be:
- Operational Verification
- Self-Service Feature Performance
- Shift performance testing left
- Performance testing with realistic data
Journey Diagram
flowchart TD
subgraph EC[The Emerald City - Developer Portal]
Portal[Central Portal]
subgraph Buildings[Four Pillars]
DV[Operational Verification]
SF[Self-Service Performance]
OB[Observability Performance]
DS[Realistic Data Store]
end
Portal --- DV
Portal --- SF
Portal --- OB
Portal --- DS
DV -->|Verify| Deploy[Deployment]
SF -->|Test| Perf1[Performance Tests]
OB -->|Monitor| Metrics[Metrics & Alerts]
DS -->|Provide| RealData[Realistic Data]
end
subgraph YBR[Yellow Brick Road - Development Journey]
Dev[Developer] --> Code[Code Creation]
Code --> Unit[Local Testing - Unit Tests]
Unit --> Integration[Integration Tests]
Integration --> Feature[Feature Tests]
Feature --> E2E[End to End Tests]
E2E --> Review[Review & Deploy]
Unit --> Perf[Performance Results]
Integration --> Perf
Feature --> Perf
E2E --> Perf
end
subgraph Guide[Journey Companions]
Tools[Development Tools]
Docs[Knowledge Base]
Data[Test Data Sets]
Insights[Performance Insights]
end
Perf --> Guide
Dev <--> Portal
Dev <--> Guide
Portal --> Guide
style EC fill:#98FB98,stroke:#333,stroke-width:2px
style YBR fill:#FFD700,stroke:#333,stroke-width:2px
style Guide fill:#87CEEB,stroke:#333
style Portal fill:#00FF00,stroke:#333
style Dev fill:#70a9e6,stroke:#333,stroke-width:3px
style Buildings fill:#90EE90,stroke:#333
Common Links
Engineers in this team support Performance Enablement projects.
Team members
Engineering Manager: Kassandra Svoboda
| S.No |
|
| 1 |
Andy Hohenner |
| 2 |
Brittany Wilkerson |
| 3 |
Jim Baumgardner |
| 4 |
John McDonnell |
| 5 |
Nivetha Prabakaran |
| 6 |
Vishal Patel |
OKRs
Every quarter, the team commits to Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). The below shows current quarter OKRs and is updated regularly as the quarter progresses.
Primary Projects
All Projects
| Name |
Description |
| Backup and Restore |
The Backup and Restore pipelines are designed to build environments using GET that are based on different Reference Architectures. Each is designed to run through the backup and restore process and verify the data that has been restored. |
| GitLab Browser Performance Tool |
A sister pipeline to GPT’s backend performance pipelines, these pipelines are designed to specifically test web page frontend performance in browsers. |
| Performance Test Data |
This Project serves as an LFS data repository for the GitLab Performance Tool |
| Performance Docker Images |
Docker builder and registry for GitLab Performance testing |
| AI Gateway Latency Baseline Executor |
Gets the latency baseline for AI Gateway in a specific region |
Roadmap
Working with us
To request for help with performance testing of a new feature, please create a new issue within the GPT project with the request for help template.
For individual questions please reach out to the team through our Slack channels.
Slack Channels
How we work
Meetings and Scheduled Calls
Our preference is to work asynchronously, within our projects issues trackers.
The team does have a set of regular synchronous calls:
- Performance Enablement Team meeting
- 1-1s between the Individual Contributors and Engineering Manager
Project Management
The majority of our project management process is described at the Platforms level and is shared between all Infrastructure Platform teams. Please read this first.
Project management links
Status Updates
- By 20:00 UTC / 03:00 PM ET on Fridays DRIs of OKRs to provide a status update in the comment section of the OKR
- Format for weekly update:
- Date of Update (YYYY-MM-DD)
- Brief update (~sentence or couple bullets) for each of these four bullets:
- Status update - Progress has been updated to X %.
- What was done ✅ - Unblocked blockers, any other progress achieved
- Next steps 👷
- Blockers :octagonal_sign: - Issues or unexpected work that blocked/affected progress. For example, customer escalations/on-call DRI
- ASYNC weekly epic status updates
See the documentation
Overview
Performance Testing is a broad discipline that includes various approaches to evaluate a system’s performance characteristics. Load Testing, while often considered synonymous with Performance Testing is one of many approaches to Performance Testing. There are other approaches that do not involve load and enable Shifting Left and Right Performance Testing.
Performance testing is not limited to the final stages of development or to load testing scenarios. It can and should be integrated throughout the entire software development lifecycle, from early stages (shift left) to production monitoring (shift right). This comprehensive approach allows teams to gain a holistic understanding of their system’s performance characteristics. It can also be done on all testing levels not waiting for a full component or system to be ready for testing.
Overview
The goal of this page is to document existing Quality Engineering activities in Distribution group.
Dashboards
Quality work
Quality work is being tracked in epic#9057. The epic lists large initiatives that need to be worked on to better support quality in Distribution group.
