Repo editor retrospective
This a follow-up issue regarding https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/merge_requests/12198
A lot of things went wrong here from looking at it from the outside that we should improve.
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The merge request was merged without going through the correct reviewer-maintainer cycle. From looking at it, a few maintainers reviewed the code a little. But it didn't seem to go through a full review where every line of code was read & no maintainer gave the final approval & merge. Please correct me if i'm wrong on this, but this is what it seems like.
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It didn't go through the process of a 'Vue expert' reviewing the code. This process was discussed several times in the past & it was to improve our Vue code. This is documented in the frontend documentation https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/development/fe_guide/index.html#vue-features
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Did the backend code get reviewed?
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It was merged even though there are a lot of bugs (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/36142 & there are a lot of "follow up" issues ), some of which stop the feature from working & where known about at the time of merged. I don't think it is reasonable to say "its ok because its behind a user feature flag". If a user turns this on, they will be greeted with a less than ideal experience. Are we ok with this?
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With features starting to be put behind a feature flag I think we need to have a process in which we are happy with the feature going into the release but everyone is under the understanding that it is not 100% perfect & that we have a plan to improve it in subsequent releases to get it to our standard.
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The end result vs the designs are not consistent. We have created processes to improve our UX polish, all of which were seemed to of been ignored here. Did UX give their approval?
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A lot of the tasks in the merge request are still left un-ticked - some of which are quite important.
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I can't see if anyone is actually scheduled to work on it this release. If we want to enable this for all users in 10.0 it will need a lot of work to get up to the standard we would be proud of. This will need 1 if not 2 frontend engineers to get it up to the standard we want it to be.
Improvements
These are two improvements I believe we should look at doing for future issues.
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Could the scope of been reduced? Done in iterations rather than everything at once.
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Create a process for features that go behind feature flags so that everyone is aware of what we deem as feature flag worthy.