Getting the Most Out Of Your GitLab Investment

Aligning GitLab with Your Business Goals

Before diving into GitLab’s features, you must define clear objectives for its implementation. Once these are defined, you can configure GitLab to your unique development style. This ensures your workflows are optimized for efficiency. Certain features may be more useful for specific teams such as GitLab boards for Agile teams or automation features for companies aiming for faster time-to-market. Once you identify what your objectives are, your team can map GitLab’s capabilities to your needs. GitLab offers group-level settings that allow you to standardize these controls across projects. These include:

• CI/CD Pipelines: 
  • Automate testing and deployment for faster releases.
  • Define shared CI/CD variables for all projects within the group

• Package & Dependency Management

• Use the GitLab Package Registry to store and share dependencies across projects.

• Project Creation & Visibility Settings

• Define whether new projects are private, internal, or public by default.

By implementing group-level role management and regularly performing access reviews, you can maintain a secure and well-organized GitLab environment.

Streamline Collaboration Across Teams

Effective collaboration is key to maximizing GitLab’s potential. GitLab offers multiple features to help improve collaboration, or you can integrate it with other collaboration tools. Connecting GitLab with Jira, Slack, and Kubernetes can help enhance workflows. As far as GitLab’s native features go, its merge request workflows help improve collaboration. By implementing structured code reviews your team can foster high-quality contributions across teams. Additionally, GitLab’s native discussion and comment capabilities allow teams to streamline cross-functional teamwork.

Automate Processes with CI/CD Pipelines

Automation is at the heart of GitLab’s DevOps philosophy. Continuous Integration Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) is a software development method where you continuously build, test, deploy, and monitor iterative code changes. GitLab CI/CD helps catch bugs early in the development cycle and ensures that the code deployed to production complies with all established standards. When utilizing this method, it’s important to build efficient pipelines. You can do so by utilizing cache dependencies to store reusable artifacts. This reduces build times. Additionally, it is best practice to standardize your pipelines. GitLab offers CI/CD templates to help maintain consistency. If you follow these best practices, you can reduce manual testing with automation, ultimately leading to more efficient software delivery.

Improve Code Quality and Security

GitLab offers many built-in tools to maintain high-quality code and security standards. Firstly, GitLab has code quality checks and Static & Dynamic Application Security Testing (SAST/DAST). These automate code style enforcement and identify vulnerabilities early. Users can also set up automated dependency scanning to detect security flaws in third-party libraries. Furthermore, users can ensure compliance with internal and regulatory security policies by utilizing GitLab’s audit features.

Foster Innovation with GitLab

GitLab offers many features that encourage teams to experiment and continuously improve. For one, GitLab offers continuous updates that keep your organization up-to-date with competitive features. GitLab also offers feature flags that allow you to deploy new features to select users before a full release. This encourages users to experiment. In addition to this, GitLab offers Value Stream Analytics which help identify bottlenecks so your team can optimize your development workflows.

Measure and Optimize ROI

To ensure you are maximizing your GitLab investment it’s best to track key performance metrics. These can include deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, mean time to restore, merge request cycle time, CI/CD pipeline efficiency, and more. In addition to this, you can utilize GitLab’s built-in dashboards to make data-driven decisions and optimize team performance. Examples of optimizing ROI include utilizing SAST/DAST reports to improve code quality and security compliance, ensuring no regulatory costs occur. Furthermore, users can utilize metrics from GitLab’s monitoring capabilities to reduce the Change Failure Rate (CFR) which improves software stability.

Leverage Expert Resources and Training

The last way to help maximize your ROI is investing in training and expert guidance to ensure long-term success. GitLab offers its own trainings and certifications to upskill your team for better adoption. If you’d like to take a different approach, working with a GitLab solution partner such as SPK and Associates ensures you get tailored implementation to your organization. Additionally, utilizing a partner means you have support from experts. Lastly, whether your employ a solution provider or not, staying engaged with the GitLab community can help you stay informed about current best practices and updates.

Ready to Maximize Your GitLab Investment?

Maximizing the value of your GitLab investment requires configuration optimization, collaboration, workflow automation, and enhanced security. By utilizing GitLab’s auditing tools, you can track impacts and invest in expertise. Fully leveraging GitLab’s potential leads to costs saved as well as new levels of efficiency for your team. If your organization is ready to optimize your GitLab implementation, contact us. Our experts can give you a consultation to unlock the full power of GitLab for your organization’s innovation needs.