Developer Experience

Developer Experience is a newly formed group, born from the strategic merger of the Engineering Productivity team and the Test Platform sub-department. This exciting combination allows us to take a holistic approach to delivering cutting-edge Platform capabilities.

Mission

Our mission is to empower developers to focus on innovation, build, and deliver high-quality products to our customers. We aim to achieve this through:

State-of-the-art developer tooling.
Robust and reliable test infrastructure.
Data-driven analysis for informed decision-making.
Streamlined release and test governance to ensure consistency, compliance, and quality across the development lifecycle.
Continuous performance profiling.

Team Structure

Infrastructure Platforms Department structure is documented in our handbook.

OKRs

TODO

Weights

We use Fibonacci Series for weights and limit the highest number to 8. The definitions are as below:

Weight	Description
1 - Trivial	Simple and quick changes such as typo fixes, test tag updates, or trivial documentation additions
2 - Small	Straight forward changes with no underlying dependencies needed, such as new tests that use existing factories or page objects
3 - Medium	Well understood changes with a few dependencies. Few surprises can be expected, such as new tests that require new factories or page objects/components
5 - Large	A task that will require some investigation and research, in addition to the above weights, such as tests that need framework level changes which can impact other parts of the test suite
8 - X-large	A very large task that will require much investigation and research. Pushing initiative level
13 or more	Please break the work down further, we do not use weights higher than 8.

Developer Experience group structure

Team Members

Management team

Name	Role

Individual contributors

The following people are members of the Development Analytics group:

Name	Role
Abhinaba Ghosh	Engineering Manager, Test Platform, Development Analytics
Andrejs Cunskis	Senior Software Engineer in Test, Development Analytics
Dan Davison	Staff 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

The following people are members of the Developer 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

The following people are members of the Feature Readiness group:

Name	Role
Kassandra Svoboda	Manager, Quality Engineering, Core Platform & SaaS Platform
Andy Hohenner	Senior Software Engineer in Test, SaaS Platforms:US Public Sector Services
Brittany Wilkerson	Senior Software Engineer in Test, Dedicated:Environment Automation
Jim Baumgardner	Software Engineer in Test, SaaS Platforms:US Public Sector Services
John McDonnell	Senior Software Engineer in Test, Systems:Gitaly
Nivetha Prabakaran	Software Engineer in Test, Dev:Manage
Richard Chong	Senior Software Engineer in Test, Developer Experience:Feature Readiness
Sanad Liaquat	Staff Software Engineer in Test, Test and Tools Infrastructure
Sofia Vistas	Senior Software Engineer in Test, Test and Tools Infrastructure
Vishal Patel	Software Engineer in Test, Core Platform:Systems

The following people are members of the Performance Enablement group:

Name	Role
Kassandra Svoboda	Manager, Quality Engineering, Core Platform & SaaS Platform
Andy Hohenner	Senior Software Engineer in Test, SaaS Platforms:US Public Sector Services
Brittany Wilkerson	Senior Software Engineer in Test, Dedicated:Environment Automation
Jim Baumgardner	Software Engineer in Test, SaaS Platforms:US Public Sector Services
John McDonnell	Senior Software Engineer in Test, Systems:Gitaly
Nivetha Prabakaran	Software Engineer in Test, Dev:Manage
Richard Chong	Senior Software Engineer in Test, Developer Experience:Feature Readiness
Sanad Liaquat	Staff Software Engineer in Test, Test and Tools Infrastructure
Sofia Vistas	Senior Software Engineer in Test, Test and Tools Infrastructure
Vishal Patel	Software Engineer in Test, Core Platform:Systems

The following people are members of the Test Governance group:

Name	Role
Ksenia Kolpakova	Engineering Manager, Test Platform, Test Engineering

Bug Prioritization

This page describes the bug prioritization process performed by the quality engineering sub-department as part of the cross-functional prioritization process.

Debugging Failing Tests and Test Pipelines

Guidelines for investigating end-to-end test pipeline failures

Developer Experience Dashboards

This handbook page serves as a central repository for all our Developer Experience dashboard details

Developer Experience Design Documents

A design document describes a technical vision and a set of principles that will guide various Developer Experience tool implementation, as we move forward. It acts as guardrails to keep team aligned.

They are version controlled documents that are constantly updated with new insights and knowledge, after every iteration, to become even more useful with time.

Contributing

At GitLab, everyone can contribute, including to our design documents. If you would like to contribute to any of these documents, feel free to:

Developer Experience On-call Rotation

The Developer Experience Sub-Department has two on-call rotations: pipeline triage (SET-led) and incident management (QEM-led).

Developer Experience Onboarding

Guidelines for onboarding as a new Developer Experience Stage member

Developer Experience Project Management

Guidelines for project management for the Developer Experience Stage at GitLab

Developer Tooling team

The Developer Tooling team enables all GitLab contributors to efficiently deliver results for customers by providing stable and performant software development tools, such as the GitLab Development Kit.