Developer Experience

The Developer Experience section is focused on improving the developer experience to enable all teams to ship high-quality changes

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. |

Developer Experience group structure

graph TD
    DE[Developer Experience group]
    click DE "/handbook/engineering/infrastructure-platforms/developer-experience"

    DE --> DA[Development Analytics]
    click DA "/handbook/engineering/infrastructure-platforms/developer-experience/development-analytics"
    DE --> DT[Developer Tooling]
    click DT "/handbook/engineering/infrastructure-platforms/developer-experience/developer-tooling"
    DE --> FR[Feature Readiness]
    click FR "/handbook/engineering/infrastructure-platforms/developer-experience/feature-readiness"
    DE --> PE[Performance Enablement]
    click PE "/handbook/engineering/infrastructure-platforms/developer-experience/performance-enablement"
    DE --> TG[Test Governance]
    click TG "/handbook/engineering/infrastructure-platforms/developer-experience/test-governance"

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
Amy Phillips	Senior Engineering Manager, Dedicated
Chloe Liu	Staff Software Engineer in Test, Development Analytics
Désirée Chevalier	Senior Software Engineer in Test, Test Governance
Abhinaba Ghosh	Engineering Manager, Test Platform, Development Analytics
Harsha Muralidhar	Senior Software Engineer in Test, Govern
Jay McCure	Senior Software Engineer in Test, Dev:Create
Joy Roodnick	Software Engineer in Test", Test Governance
Kassandra Svoboda	Manager, Quality Engineering, Core Platform & SaaS Platform
Mohga Gamea	Manager, Quality Engineering
Tiffany Rea	Senior Software Engineer in Test, CI:Verify
Tim Beauchamp	Software Engineer in Test
Will Meek	Senior Software Engineer in Test, Test Governance

Project Management

We use epics, issues, and issue/epic boards to organize our work, as they complement each other.

The structure of epics, and the responsibilities of the DRI are documented on the The Infrastructure Platforms Project Management handbook page

Weights

When estimating work, 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.

Bug Prioritization

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

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 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

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.