Lessons learned from Gerrit 2.7 to 2.14 migration

At Intel connectivity division Gerrit is in the center of our Continuous Delivery setup that supports daily work of few thousand developers.

Gerrit is customized to automate daily work and improve the quality of our deliveries. Many of those customizations have been done directly in the Gerrit core based on the 2.7 version.

Recently we went through an upgrade from 2.7 to 2.14. Apart from redesigning our customizations we had to coordinate a rollout in the large development organization that minimizes the impact on the customer deliveries.

We would like to share with you lessons learned from this experience. They cover some of the technical challanges as well as other aspects that are often forgotten like communication strategy, stakeholder alignment, documentation, test coverage and team work.

Krzysztof Miesniak, Workflow Architect and Software Engineering Manager, Intel Corporation