Make Review Apps Part of GitLab Development
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Right now our development cycle works like so:
- Idea created, designs made, development begins.
- Feature created, tests get written.
- Submit MR to GL. Get tests to pass.
- Tests pass get review. Review returns for fixes. Fixes made resubmitted n times. Reviewer finally gives the LGTM and code gets merged.
- Nightly dev build happens. No one looks.
- RC gets created and stuff goes to GL. Some look, reports come in of broken stuff.
- Fix the bugs on GL.com. Push again.
We are missing half of the dev process here. We could easily stop 99% of the bad stuff before it makes it to GL.com.
- Devs should be actively look at their work on a live server with live data.
- It should be tested on there and reviewed on there just as much as it is tested locally.
- The reviewer should be testing dev stuff on a server, not locally.
- Only development should happen on the localhost. Reviewer should not be reviewing on localhost. It is a huge waste of time. Maintainer's time is precious and should not be spent attempting to get stuff to run.
The biggest time spent currently for me is getting the app running. Apps have special requirements. The new Auditor feature was a huge PITA to get running properly. No one's fault, that's just reality. If I would have tried it myself it could have easily taken a 30min+ just to get the thing running. I wound up just screen sharing with @jivanvl. These problems can be prevented.
Resources are precious to infra and creating all these review apps containers for everyone will be too expensive. Can we have 1 container per maintainer. A maintainer container?
If not this then review apps needs to happen. We could save days of time for reviewers to make this happen. And years of life returned from stress by getting things running over and over again.
cc @stanhu