Test Platform Project Management
Projects
The Test Platform sub-department currently works cross-functionally, and our task ownership spans multiple projects. Most of our projects can be found here.
- GitLab.org
Managing Projects
In the Test Platform sub-department at GitLab, our goal is to standardize project regulation processes, ensuring efficient and consistent management of repositories, including personal, established, and archived projects. By establishing clear guidelines, we aim to clarify ownership, enhance cross-team collaboration, and streamline project transitions.
Personal Projects
Personal Projects are for individual exploration and learning opportunities. These projects provide a sandbox environment for testing new ideas or technologies without the need for formal review.
- Use GitLab’s personal namespaces.
- Make projects private or internal to minimize clutter in the main group.
POC (Proof of Concept) Projects
POC Projects are to explore and validate new concepts or technologies that could potentially bring value to the Test Platform sub-department or broader organization. They are more formal than Personal Projects and are expected to have a clearly defined scope and objectives.
- Ensure that the project is created under the Quality Department group for organizational alignment.
- Make projects Public or Internal based on the required collaboration needs.
- In the README of your POC project, add a section linking to the relevant GitLab issues for tracking progress and challenges, and clearly state the POC project owner’s name and role, along with a brief outline of the project’s scope and objectives.
- Adhere to GitLab’s code of conduct and privacy policies.
Established Projects
Established Projects are those that have proven their value, are mature, and are fully integrated into regular department workflows. These projects are critical to the department’s operations and require ongoing management and development.
- Ensure that the project is created under the Quality Department group for organizational alignment.
- Make projects Public or Internal based on the required usage needs.
- Add Ownership details for the established project by following below steps:
- Navigate to your project and select “Settings” > “General”.
- In the General settings, find and expand the “Badges” section.
- Enter “Maintainers” as the badge name.
- Provide the link to the team page in the handbook. This should be the team-specific page that lists the team Slack handle, team members, and board details.
- Use a custom badge image URL structured as suggested:
https://img.shields.io/badge/maintained_by-{{team_name}}-blue. Replace{{team_name}}with the appropriate test-platform team name. - After filling in the details, select “Add badge” to create the maintainer badge.
- If there are multiple maintainers, create separate maintainer badges
- Adhere to GitLab’s code of conduct and privacy policies.
Project Deprecation
Deprecation of a project is a significant decision and should be based on clear, objective criteria. Here are the key factors to consider:
- Decline in usage metrics over a sustained period.
- Lack of relevance to current organizational goals or technology trends.
- Existence of newer tools or platforms that effectively replace the project’s functionality.
The process of deprecating a project should be methodical and transparent to all stakeholders:
- Conduct a thorough review of the project against the deprecation criteria.
- Inform all stakeholders, including project maintainers, users, and dependent teams, about the decision to deprecate.
- For an established project, ensure all valuable data and documentation are securely archived.
- Move the archived project in the test-platform-deprecated group.
- Consider deleting the project after a three-month window from the archival for established projects. Deletion can be performed immediately for personal and POC projects once the purpose is served.
Reviewers and maintainers
Upon joining the Test Platform sub-department, team members are granted either developer, maintainer, or owner access to a variety of core projects. For projects where only developer access is initially granted, there are some criteria that should be met before maintainer access is granted.
- GitLab (/qa)
- Test Platform team members are code owners for this directory. If you are tagged by a developer and don’t yet feel comfortable approving a merge request, please tag another member of the Test Platform sub-department to help review.
- In general, we expect that team members will generally feel comfortable and will be granted maintainer access once they have:
- Authored and reviewed 3 MRs related to improvements to the framework.
- Authored and reviewed 5 MRs related to adding new end-to-end tests or making substantial improvements to existing ones.
- GitLab-QA
- Authored and reviewed 5 merged MRs that demonstrate good understanding of the codebase.
- Reviewed 5 MRs that make substantial improvements.
- GitLab CustomersDot (/qa)
- Test Platform team members are code owners for this directory. If you are tagged by a developer and don’t yet feel comfortable approving a merge request, please tag another member of the Test Platform team to help review.
- In general, we expect that team members will generally feel comfortable and will be granted maintainer access once they have:
- Authored and reviewed 5 MRs related to improvements to the framework.
- Authored and reviewed 10 MRs related to adding new end-to-end tests or making substantial improvements to existing ones.
- GitLab Environment Toolkit (GET)
- Select Self-Managed Platform team members are code owners for this directory. If you are tagged by a developer and don’t yet feel comfortable approving a merge request, please reach out to the Self-Managed Platform team to help review.
- In general, team members looking to become maintainers of this project are recommended to have a good working knowledge of Terraform, Ansible and the GitLab application itself first before applying. We expect that team members will generally feel comfortable and will be granted maintainer access once they have:
- Authored and reviewed 10 MRs related to improvements to the toolkit.
- Authored and reviewed 5 MRs related to adding making substantial improvements or additions.
- After completing the above requirement, the maintainer should be vetted by an existing maintainer for the Toolkit. An issue should be created in the project outlining the reasons why this person should be a maintainer. List all 15 MRs in the issue to help aid with review.
- GitLab Performance Tool (GPT)
- Select Self-Managed Platform team members are code owners for this directory. If you are tagged by a developer and don’t yet feel comfortable approving a merge request, please reach out to the Self-Managed Platform team to help review.
- In general, team members looking to become maintainers of this project are recommended to have a good working knowledge of performance testing in general, k6 and the GitLab application itself first before applying. We expect that team members will generally feel comfortable and will be granted maintainer access once they have:
- Authored and reviewed 5 MRs related to new tests in the Tool.
- Authored and reviewed 3 MRs related to improvements to the Tool.
- After completing the above requirement the maintainer should be vetted by an existing maintainer for the Tool. An issue should be created in the project outlining the reasons why this person should be a maintainer. List all 10 MRs in the issue to help aid with review.
Becoming a maintainer
The following guidelines will help you to become a maintainer. Remember that there is no specific timeline on this, and that you should work together with your manager and current maintainers.
To start the process of becoming a maintainer, see the maintainer section of the code review guidelines.
In general, you’re required to author and review 3 - 10 MRs that demonstrate good overall understanding
of the existing codebase and framework. See the section above for further details of the requirements.
You can seek out more opportunities to work on framework improvements by asking on the #test-platform Slack channel.
Your reviews should aim to cover maintainer responsibilities as well as reviewer responsibilities. Your approval means you think it is ready to merge.
It is your responsibility to set up any necessary meetings to discuss your progress with current maintainers, as well as your manager. These can be at any frequency that is right for you.
Project Management
Our sub-department’s work can span over 10k+ issues hence as a result, we have specific team boards for the 3 teams in Test Platform Sub-department.
Test and Tools Infrastructure
This board shows the current ownership of workload / issues related to test tooling and test infrastructure needs.
Self-Managed Platform team
This board shows the current ownership of workload / issues related to Self-Managed tooling and Core Platform testing needs.
Test Engineering
This board shows the current ownership of workload / issues related to testing and tooling needs to support feature development within Core Development and Expansion Development department.
How to use the boards
Each project planning, scheduling and triaging process will happen in the team boards.
The boards are using a consistent configuration and is the same across all of our projects. This means that anyone on the team can work using the same set of tools everywhere.
Think of all these projects as different class of objects with stable interface methods that is consistent and cross-compatible.
This also ensures that the data rolled up to the top level board is consistent.
Board Overview
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