Infrastructure and Quality department

Vision

Our vision is to be a world-class Infrastructure & Tools department that enables GitLab to meet & exceed our customers’ needs.

We:

Build critical infrastructure, metrics & tools that enable GitLab Engineering & Product teams to do their best work efficiently and ship high-quality & reliable products to our customers.
Are customer focused. We have an ambitious drive to attain high availability & reliability for SaaS platforms and self-managed customers.
Provide and maintain best practice tools and methodologies that create a platform for engineering teams to do their work productively.
Enable GitLab Engineering & Product teams to run services effectively using our tools, to meet business needs & SLOs.

Direction

Direction is set within the Infrastructure, and the Quality direction pages. With the ongoing consolidation of the departments, separate direction pages will become obsolete.

Working with us

With the consolidation of previously separate departments (Infrastructure, Quality), we are in the process of also consolidating previously separate handbook pages:

We welcome contributions, and if you find an opportunity to consolidate information, please submit a Merge Request!

Engaging with the Infrastructure teams

Two distinct groups are responsible for infrastructure at GitLab:

Platforms, responsible for software delivery, scaling and operations of single and multi tenant GitLab SaaS
Reliability, which operate all user-facing GitLab.com services.

To create an issue, or find how to engage with the related teams you can use the links below:

Delivery - Follow directions how to reach us urgently
Reliability
- You can read more about how reliability triages issues here.
Scalability
GitLab Dedicated

Engaging with the Quality teams

graph TD
    A[Quality Department]
    A --> B[Engineering Analytics Team]
    A --> D(Quality Engineering Sub-Department)
    A --> E[Engineering Productivity Team]

    click A "/handbook/engineering/quality"
    click B "/handbook/engineering/quality/engineering-analytics"
    click D "/handbook/engineering/infrastructure/test-platform"
    click E "/handbook/engineering/infrastructure/engineering-productivity"

Communication

In addition to GitLab’s communication guidelines and engineering communication, we communicate and collaborate actively across GitLab in the following venues:

Meetings
Key Review
Group Conversations

Meetings

GitLab is an all-remote, timezone distributed company as such we optimize for asynchronous communication. While some topics benefit from a real-time discussion, we should always evaluate meetings to ensure they are valuable. We follow the guidance for all-remote meetings, including starting and ending on time - or earlier.

Infrastructure and Quality team calendars are shared with the company.

A well prepared meeting:

must have a Google Doc agenda attached to the invite, organized by date, and with edit rights open to GitLab. This allows participants to prepare before the start of each meeting, and take notes druing the meeting.
must start on time
can have a read-only, and discussion section. Read-only section does not get verbalized, but the questions around read-only items can be asked in the discussion section
can have multiple topics.
can be deliberately be scheduled to occur twice to better include all global participants. This is considered to be the same meeting, just held at different times.

The following cross-functional meetings are regularly scheduled:

OKR

Department level view of OKR and scoring is on our Infrastructure & Quality OKR page

Each sub-department has different guidance on OKR:

Key Review

Key Review meetings provide the department leadership an opportunity to inform the executive team of our performance indicator progress, results on OKRs, and updates on any Cross-functional Key Initiatives which we are leading.

Key Review meetings are facilitated and led by the currently responsible VP, with Directors being the backup DRIs.

Group Conversations

Group Conversation meetings take the information from the Key Review (plus any additional topics) and present this to an audience that is all of GitLab, and for Infrastructure, is a Public livestream.

Coordination of Infrastructure-Quality Group Conversation materials and facilitation of the discussion is a rotating role among the managers within the department.

Group Conversation DRI Schedule

Quick checklist for the host (time order):

Make the GC slides (copy from a prior presentation) ~ 10 days before the GC
Watch how to stream on youtube
Do a test stream on youtube.
Review the handbook instructions for Group Conversation Meeting Leaders and follow the required process.
20 minutes before - open up Zoom and check for any updates.

|GC Date|DRI| | 2023-04-26 | Platforms EM | | 2023-07-25 | Reliability EM | | 2023-11-09 | Quality Engineering EM | | 2024-01-24 | Engineering Productivity EM | |TBD| Engineering Analytics EM| |TBD| Platforms EM | |TBD| Reliability EM | |TBD| Quality EM | |TBD| Engineering Productivity EM | |TBD| Engineering Analytics EM |

Historical preparation for Quality sub-department is in the issue tracker with a group-conversation label.

Performance Indicators

Performance Indicators

Common Links

Last modified January 29, 2024: fix: Fix links to the "Working Groups" directory and the "Organizational Structure" page. (c556f941)

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