Differentiate between Department and Project group in Gitlab

Question

As a Gitlab Admin, I have to create different Groups for different departments and add members to it. Some Departments conatins Sub-Departments so I create Sub-Group in Gitlab for it.

As of now everything ok. But, I came to a situation where, I have create project group so that it can have Software, Hardware and Firware code seperatly stored in it. So, I created a sub-group with Project name and added three individual projects in it.

My question is, Did using Sub-Group for both Sub-Department and Sub-Project is ok? Or can I improve this in any way?

PS: I added Github tag so that question reaches more people and may have common ideas. Not intended to create any confusion or false tagging.

Answer 1

According to GitLab's Documentation on Subgroups, they are meant specifically for the following reasons:

• Separate internal / external organizations. Since every group can have its own visibility level, you are able to host groups for different purposes under the same umbrella.
• Organize large projects. For large projects, subgroups makes it potentially easier to separate permissions on parts of the source code.
• Make it easier to manage people and control visibility. Give people different permissions depending on their group membership.

So, according to these three reasons provided in the docs, I would say that:

• Yes, Subgroups can definitely be used for Sub-Departments (according to the first and last reason), to create the right departmental / sub-departmental divisions in terms of visibility and and permissions, and
• Yes, Subgroups can definitely be used for Sub-Projects of a bigger Project (according to the second reason), to separate permissions on parts of the source code to organize large Projects.

In order to provide a differentiation between Groups / Subgroups there are two main tools available in GitLab:

• Group / Subgroup name. You may specify a specific prefix or infix to differentiate project groups / subgroups from departmental ones. For instance sp-, having project1-sp-firmware for the Subproject firmware subgroup and project1-marketing for the marketing Subdepartment. (This is just an example to give an idea, you should of course look at the best solution for your own specific organization and structure.)
• Avatars. You may specify different kinds of avatars (specific colors or subjects) according if it is a Subdepartment or a Subproject. For instance, blue avatars for Subprojects and yellow avatars for Subdepartments. Or same color within the same department... and so on. Here is a website that generates letters avatars (max 2 letters): https://ui-avatars.com.