Improve collaboration with Slack

Problems

• GitLab is great for collaboration. In particular, keeping track of histories and the most up to date single source of truth / consensus.
• GitLab is not good at chat use cases. GitLab is not as powerful for real-time communications.
• Slack is very good for chat and real-time communications.
• How can we better integrate with Slack to fill these gaps.
• How can we make sure we are not just building another GitLab inside Slack, but instead, identifying problems in the digital collaboration workflow that can be solved with Slack features.
• There are developer and DevOps focused problems to solve, that are focused on a fairly linear workflow of getting code into production with feedback.
• There are also higher-level collaboration problems to solve. These involve users beyond developers/engineers that are doing more planning and design work.

Use cases

Resource allocation

• Person pastes issue into Slack.
• Discussion about capacity planning and resource allocation.
• Decision. Update issue with assignment. Do that inside Slack.

Generic light issue management inside Slack

Notifications (Pushing information)

Show statuses / summary / descriptions (Pulling information)

Capture real-time discussions

• Spontaneous discussion about a certain issue in Slack.
• Capture discussion log it into a GitLab issue for posterity.

Onboarding of Slack in Slack

Design notes

• Since this is an integration, Slack does have design best practices. Many of these are shown in their existing third party apps.
• They have said that they will publish some type of design guide in the future.

Ongoing issues

• https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/32164
• https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/32165
• https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/32173
• https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/32167

changed milestone to %Next 3-6 months in gitlab-foss

changed the description

@sarrahvesselov : We have an existing, very bare-bones integration with Slack. With 9.4, we want to get a native app into the Slack app directory as a baseline. Beyond that, let's ensure we have good design-driven features to solve our problems, as we discussed.

There's already a lot of good ideas that we can learn from other dev tools that have Slack integration. But lets use this issue for the UX team to do some broader design work. What do you think?

added UX in GitLab FOSS label

I saw the summary of this in my to-do's and was like, another slack issue? Which is my way of saying thank you for creating this parent UX issue to asses the design from a broader perspective. I think this is an excellent idea.

moved from gitlab-foss#33373 (moved)