[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":808},["ShallowReactive",2],{"/en-us/blog/risk-mapping":3,"navigation-en-us":40,"banner-en-us":440,"footer-en-us":450,"blog-post-authors-en-us-Erick Banks|John McGuire":692,"blog-related-posts-en-us-risk-mapping":718,"assessment-promotions-en-us":760,"next-steps-en-us":798},{"id":4,"title":5,"authorSlugs":6,"body":9,"categorySlug":10,"config":11,"content":15,"description":9,"extension":28,"isFeatured":13,"meta":29,"navigation":30,"path":31,"publishedDate":22,"seo":32,"stem":37,"tagSlugs":38,"__hash__":39},"blogPosts/en-us/blog/risk-mapping.yml","Risk Mapping",[7,8],"erick-banks","john-mcguire",null,"unfiltered",{"slug":12,"featured":13,"template":14},"risk-mapping",false,"BlogPost",{"title":16,"description":17,"authors":18,"heroImage":21,"date":22,"body":23,"category":10,"tags":24},"How the Search Team at GitLab Implemented a Risk Map to Direct Automated Testing Efforts","A justification of how the search team decided to try risk mapping as an ongoing exercise to determine where test automation should be written, and some guidance on how to create a risk map.",[19,20],"Erick Banks","John McGuire","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749669590/Blog/Hero%20Images/niklas_hamann-fyvNzhJTQBA-unsplash.jpg","2020-09-03","\n\n{::options parse_block_html=\"true\" /}\n\n\n\n**_’What's the good of Mercator's North Poles and Equators,_**\n\n**_Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?’_**\n\n**_So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply_**\n\n**_‘They are merely conventional signs!’_**\n\n**-Lewis Carroll, \"The Hunting of the Snark\"**\n\nWhen I first started at GitLab I was hired to automate a specific task for the advanced search team: search for security holes in our data redaction logic. Shortly after my being hired this mandate became moot. Simultaneously, the search team was also in the middle of transitioning our product manager to a new team and introducing a new one. This left me with some existential angst around my role as the software engineer in test for the search team. I mean, there’s always work to do, but *what* work would be *most helpful*?\n\nAfter a few months of seeing bug reports being filed by users and GitLab team members, I thought it would be best to try to direct our testing efforts where we have the most unmitigated risk. But, how would we come to know with any degree of certainty where that is? To find out I made a risk map.\n\nRisk maps are not new. [The United States Federal Emergency Management Agency](https://www.fema.gov/flood-maps/tools-resources/risk-map) uses them, [insurance companies](https://www.techriskreport.com/2019/10/preparing-for-data-breaches-data-mapping-response-team-and-insurance/) use them, and [software companies](https://www.pmi.org/learning/library/risk-analysis-project-management-7070) use them.\n\nThe point of the risk map is to show you and your team where in the project you are responsible for is the most unmitigated risk. It can then be used to inform what areas of the project should be the focus of adding testing, preferably automation, though not exclusive of manual testing ([exploratory testing](https://www.tricentis.com/blog/creating-an-exploratory-testing-charter/), [bug bashes](https://www.classy.org/blog/run-bug-bash/), etc.).\n\n## “The Map is Not the Territory”\n\nRisk maps are not perfect reflections of where the risk exists in your project. Any criticism of the map, “It gets stale too quickly”, “You’re distorting where the real risk lies”, “It takes too much time to keep updated”, have validity and could apply just as well to maps of physical places. In my case I would say that even a low resolution map, supported by data, of where risk is in the project is better than no map at all. Without such a map I would continue working by just relying on my gut instinct of where the risk is, or worse, I would be in the reactive state of fixing things after they’ve gone wrong. Isn’t an old, out of date map sometimes useful?\n\n## Should You Make A Risk Map?\nOf course I can’t be prescriptive about this. If you’re reading this, you are likely the best judge of if you and your team will get utility from making one. I can say that in my situation: new to the search team, transitioning to a new product manager, and no clear signal as to where the riskiest part of the project was, it made sense for me to make one.\n\n## How to get started\nIf you do decide you want to make a risk map for your team, here are some steps and tips that may help.\n\nFirst you’ll want to get a sense of what can go wrong. I call these “risk facets”. For example: a simplified view of [Elasticsearch](https://www.elastic.co/home) (the underlying tech we use for our advanced search feature at Gitlab) is that users insert records (Merge Requests, Issues, Users, Comments etc.) they want to be searchable into GitLab, that record gets indexed, and then, later, a user tries to recall that record. In this simplified view the facets could be problems around record insertion, indexing, and recall. These could be multiplexed by considerations of: speed, efficiency, and cost. So, that may yield a risk map with nine rows, or risk facets: record insertion - speed, record insertion - efficiency, record insertion - cost, record indexing - speed, etc.\n\nA helpful starting point for understanding what risk facets may be for your project is to look at the list of features it has. This is not likely to be an exhaustive list of the risk facets your project presents, but it is a good place to start.\n\nSome of these facets may have a label (or, more likely, a combination of labels) that accurately map issues to the risk facet. If your project is anything like mine, many facets will **not** have these corresponding labels. For future extensibility and automated aggregation of issues around each facet, it is important to create labels or create combinations of labels that can accurately map issues to a single risk facet.\n\nSo, take some time to read through recent issues. Look at the issues your users are filing. See if there are some shared areas around which the issues are filed. These are likely the more important risk facets. I did this over several weeks of reading issues as they were filed and extrapolating where problems could arise. I then created a list of these facets in a notebook until I found that I had a substantial amount of facets that could be tracked. Next, I transferred those risk facets to the rows of the table in the risk map issue.\n\n![Example Chart from website](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/egb/risk-map/facets.png){: .shadow.center}\n\nDo not, as I did, confuse *solutions* to risk facets for the risk facets themselves. For example, I erroneously added a row to my map for “regex - optimization”, which is a solution to the risk facet “regex - efficiency”.\n\nAfter a time of gathering the risk facets and adding them to the rows of the table in the issue it’s time to add the other columns to the table and track if those risk facets are being implicitly or explicitly tested and where. It felt important to differentiate between implicit and explicit testing because explicitly testing for every risk facet is prohibitively expensive in either time, cost, effort, etc. (or some combination thereof). Just because we aren’t explicitly testing some facet doesn’t mean there isn’t some kind of test coverage for that facet. Since the exercise is aimed at showing the team where risk facets are, their severity, and if they are being mitigated or not, showing where the implicit testing is happening is important. Fill in the implicit/explicit testing columns and add the links that point to where this testing is happening.\n\n![Example Chart from website](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/egb/risk-map/facet-coverage.png){: .shadow.center}\n\nThe last three columns compose your [risk matrix](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_matrix). They are: *risk level*, *impact*, and *likelihood*, so ordered so that the most important of the three columns, *risk level* (which is just a composite of the other two columns), is more likely to be visible before horizontally scrolling off the screen, are most likely to need input from the rest of the team. Actively solicit other team members to help fill out these columns.\n\n![Example Chart from website](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/egb/risk-map/riskmatrix.png){: .shadow.center}\n\nIt’s important to recognize that this map will never be done. You’ll never “finish it”. Incompleteness is to be expected. But what should emerge is a picture of where most of the testing is being done, and where most of the risk is being carried in the project. You can then use this to help the team align testing toward facets to better mitigate risk.\n\n![Example Chart from website](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/egb/risk-map/risk-map-sample.png){: .shadow.center}\n## Product Management\n\nTo Product Managers a risk map helps quantify the amount of energy to spend mitigating a possible risk. With a goal of not over investing in a mitigation, as well as avoiding catastrophe.  Product Managers can also help identify primary and secondary effects that can create a need to change the level of risk assessed.\nHistory is full of examples where improper risk assessments lead to preventable disasters. [PMI.org Deepwater Horizon\nLessons in Probabilities](https://www.pmi.org/learning/library/comparison-risk-events-with-risk-management-9919)\n## Next steps\n\n- Identify where the highest risk is and try to mitigate it.\n- Decide with the team how often we should update the risk map.\n- Add labels so that each issue for the search team falls into one unique risk facet.\n- Automate some of the creation of the map by aggregating issues and MRs based on the newly created labels.\n- Compare my efforts at doing this exercise with other teams (should they decide to do it as well).\n- Add features like:\n  - Sorting by risk level\n  - Toggle by open/closed/all for issues/MRs.\n  - Toggle displaying issues found by customers.\n\nLink to Risk Map: [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/229431](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/229431)\n\nLink to Risk Mapping Epic: [https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/4253](https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/4253)\n\nCover image by [Niklas Hamann](https://unsplash.com/@hamann?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText) on [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/s/photos/server?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText).\n",[25,26,27],"testing","security","research","yml",{},true,"/en-us/blog/risk-mapping",{"title":33,"description":17,"ogTitle":33,"ogDescription":17,"noIndex":13,"ogImage":21,"ogUrl":34,"ogSiteName":35,"ogType":36,"canonicalUrls":34},"Search team directs testing efforts with risk mapping","https://about.gitlab.com/blog/risk-mapping","https://about.gitlab.com","article","en-us/blog/risk-mapping",[25,26,27],"pBbla82tu_pgEvqTSabggzgj1HBgjLsC3DN1lhkqVRY",{"data":41},{"logo":42,"freeTrial":47,"sales":52,"login":57,"items":62,"search":370,"minimal":401,"duo":420,"pricingDeployment":430},{"config":43},{"href":44,"dataGaName":45,"dataGaLocation":46},"/","gitlab logo","header",{"text":48,"config":49},"Get free 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Mcguire",{"template":696},{"name":20,"config":711},{"headshot":699,"ctfId":712},"2BpYnUcWeqmuRlVM7w9ZIv",{},"/en-us/blog/authors/john-mcguire",{},"en-us/blog/authors/john-mcguire","qx9DodBh0D7hvES6-eEMbFKgPK4xtNgdoeNumU_mMrM",[719,730,745],{"content":720,"config":728},{"title":721,"description":722,"authors":723,"heroImage":725,"date":726,"body":727,"category":10},"CEO Shadow Takeaways from Jacie","Recap of my experience in the CEO Shadow Program.",[724],"Jacie Bandur","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749664102/Blog/Hero%20Images/gitlab-values-cover.png","2021-05-18","\n\n{::options parse_block_html=\"true\" /}\n\n\nHi! I’m Jacie Bandur. I completed GitLab’s CEO Shadow program from 2021-04-26 through 2021-05-07. It was a really enlightening experience. I generally work in Learning and Development and consider myself a lifelong learner. I can’t even explain how much I learned in such a short about of time. I learned a lot about the business. I learned a lot about the product. But learned even more about the importance of iteration in everything we do.\n\n### Qualifications to Participate\n\nI wanted to start this off with touching on qualifications to participate in the program.\n\nI am the type of person that has gone through most of my life thinking I’m not qualified for things. I’m not qualified for that job, that promotion, that program. The list goes on and on.\n\nWhen I saw the [CEO Shadow program](/blog/ceo-shadow-impressions-takeaways/) kick off in 2019, I really wanted to participate. I was a little intimidated. Who wouldn’t be, spending 2 weeks with the CEO of any company? But time passed and all the sudden it was 2021 and I had not taken any steps to participating in the program.\n\nIf you are sitting there waiting for someone to tell you that you are qualified to participate in this program, I’m not big on giving “pep talks,” but here’s me telling you - You are qualified for this program. There’s never going to be a good or perfect time to do it. Tell your manager you want to do the CEO Shadow program. Stop waiting. Sign up today.\n\nNote: Take a look at the [eligibility](https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/ceo/shadow/#eligibility) section of the CEO Shadow page for more information on signing up.\n\n### Pre-Program Tips\n\nThere are many things recommended for shadows to do pre-program outlined on the CEO Shadow handbook page. As I was going through the program there were things that I thought helped me (or would have helped me).\n\nHere are my top 6 recommendations:\n\n1. Make sure your team knows you will be unavailable for 2 weeks. This isn’t a program that can or should be done alongside your normal day to day work. I found catching up from the 2 weeks away kind of difficult because I was trying to keep up on what was going on and I had a bunch of half done things.\n1. Talk with people who have done the shadow program - schedule at least 3 coffee chats with CEO Shadow Alumni.\n1. Have food that is easy to eat quickly. Sid’s meetings are back to back most days, so you will have small amounts of time to eat throughout the day. Sid does eat during calls, which you are welcome to do, too, but if you are taking notes, it is difficult to eat. And this will make you realize why speedy meetings are so important!\n1. Listen to the [Executive Leadership LinkedIn Learning course](https://www.linkedin.com/learning/executive-leadership/).\n1. Be prepared to ask questions. When doing the program virtually, there isn’t a ton of time for asking questions, so when one would come up, I would add it to a note on my computer and ask if there was ever time with just the shadows and Sid.\n1. Take at least 1 day off after the program. Take even a couple of days off if you can! This is recommended on the handbook page, but I can’t stress this enough.\n\n\n### Takeaways\n\n**Group Conversations**\n\nI’ve been at GitLab for almost 4 years. When I joined, I made it a point to attend as many GC’s as I could. I had gotten out of the habit of attending Group Conversations. After attending them again for 2 weeks, I realized how important they are to understand better what is going on across the business. Everything in the organization is so intertwined. It’s helpful to understand what other teams are working on and succeeding in.\n\n**Feedback**\n\nWe should all be giving and receiving feedback often. We have a whole [handbook page on giving and receiving feedback](https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/people-group/guidance-on-feedback/). Read the handbook page and watch the videos, as well. Practice giving feedback. I recommend using the [1-1 agenda](https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/leadership/1-1/suggested-agenda-format/) Sid uses, because Feedback is an essential piece of that agenda, and it makes feedback more of a routine thing.\n\n**Biggest Takeaway**\n\nWe have an incredible team here at GitLab, from Engineering to Product to Sales to People and all the groups in between. There are so many great ideas. I observed the constant reinforcement by Sid to start with something small and build on it. You can ALWAYS make something more complex. It’s hard to go back to something more simple when you start with something complex.\n\nA couple of quotes that I heard from Sid during the program that reinforced this point:\n\n- “Every complex system evolves from a simple system that worked.”\n- “It’s very clear what is the simple solution. We can always make it more complicated as we go on.”\n\nI know they are very similar, but they happened in different meetings on different days, so the point was reinforced repeatedly.\n\nDuring the program, I reflected on the projects that I’am working on. How many of them am I trying to do too much on before releasing. Probably all of them. When I’m working on projects in the future, I will break them down into smaller, more doable chunks. Iteration is hard - it’s a skill to be practicing constantly.\n\n\n### Overall\n\nOverall, the program was really insightful and impactful. If you haven’t participated in it yet, I cannot encourage you enough to do so!\n",{"slug":729,"featured":13,"template":14},"ceo-shadow-recap",{"content":731,"config":743},{"title":732,"description":733,"authors":734,"heroImage":736,"date":737,"body":738,"category":10,"tags":739},"Why I love contributing to GitLab","Making small meaningful changes is what it's all about.",[735],"Austin Regnery","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749679501/Blog/Hero%20Images/new-feature.png","2021-05-11","It was mid-morning on a Tuesday in February, and I had 10 minutes in between meetings. So I decided to try and solve a pain point of mine.\nYou see, I had to memorize this HTML snippet to create a collapsible section in GitLab Issue descriptions and comments, but I kept forgetting it. Was it `summary` or `section`? I could never remember.\n```html\n\u003Cdetails>\n\u003Csummary>Insert Title\u003C/summary>\nHidden content\n\u003C/details>\n```\nEven though it is not vanilla Markdown, GitLab knows how to interpret some HTML. I used this formatting trick fairly often since full-page screenshots can occupy a lot of screen space, which leads to excessive scrolling.\nSo I decided to poke around our codebase to see how the other Markdown shortcuts worked. To my surprise, it was pretty straightforward. Each shortcut had a simple text input that mapped to each button. This implementation was simple to replicate since I just needed to copy/paste and replace a few words.\n![Image of Vue and Haml files with editor shortcuts](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/why-i-love-contributing-to-gitlab/vue-haml.png){: .shadow}\nThe Vue and Haml files with the new shortcut\n\nI started a branch and began hacking away at the code. Now, I would never call myself a Software Engineer, but I like to try and make things from time to time. I was able to add a new shortcut to the toolbar to insert this code snippet for me in less than 10 minutes. No more memorizing! Making contributions like this is what makes working at GitLab so special.\nNow, it wasn't ready for production, but I at least had something that worked. I shared it with my UX colleagues in Slack, and it started to gain traction with several up-votes and few constructive comments on how to make it better.\nWith the functionality flushed out, a few other designers helped me get a better icon added to our SVG library. Using clear iconography is critical for communicating information more clearly.\n| Initial Icon | Final Icon |\n| - | - |\n| ![SVG of chevron right icon](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/why-i-love-contributing-to-gitlab/chevron-right.svg) | ![SVG of details block icon](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/why-i-love-contributing-to-gitlab/details-block.svg) |\n\nThe last thing to do was resolve my failing tests, and I had several teammates help me do that.\n![Gif of the shortcut being used](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/why-i-love-contributing-to-gitlab/demo.gif)\n\nToday [this change](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests/54938) merged! Now I solved a pain point for me and others. It took a few months to go from idea to production, but the effort was super low. I'd say the return on my initial investment, 10 minutes, is super high.\n> Having a direct impact on a product was never an option for me before joining GitLab.\n\n![Image of participants in the Merge Request](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/why-i-love-contributing-to-gitlab/participants.png)\n\n\nThank you to everyone that helped me deploy this\n",[740,741,742],"UX","product","AWS",{"slug":744,"featured":13,"template":14},"why-i-love-contributing-to-gitlab",{"content":746,"config":758},{"title":747,"description":748,"authors":749,"heroImage":751,"date":737,"body":752,"category":10,"tags":753},"Placebo Lines on the Pipeline Graph","Have you noticed the connecting lines missing on your pipelines lately? Here's why",[750],"Sam Beckham","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749679507/Blog/Hero%20Images/ci-cd.png","\n\n{::options parse_block_html=\"true\" /}\n\n\n\nHave you ever pressed the close door button on the elevator, in the hope that you'll save a few precious seconds?\nOr got frustrated at the person stood next to you at the cross-walk, neglecting to press the button?\nWell, maybe they know something you don't, or perhaps you know this already.\nMany buttons in our society lie to us.\n[David McRaney](https://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/02/10/placebo-buttons/) dubbed these, \"Placebo buttons\" and they're everywhere.\nThose elevator doors won't close any faster and the cross-walk button has no effect on the lights.\nThe only lights they control are the lights on the buttons themselves.\nThey give you the feedback you crave, but that's all they're doing.\n\nThese placebos aren't constrained to the physical world, they're prevalent in [UI design](/blog/the-evolution-of-ux-at-gitlab/) too.\nFrom literal placebo buttons like [YouTube's downvote](https://www.quora.com/Does-downvoting-a-comment-on-YouTube-even-do-anything), to more subtle effects like Instagram always [pretending to work](https://www.fastcompany.com/1669788/the-3-white-lies-behind-instagrams-lightning-speed), or progress bars that have a [fixed animation](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/why-some-apps-use-fake-progress-bars/517233/).\nThey're everywhere if you know where to look.\n\nAt GitLab, we created a placebo of our own in one of our core features; the pipeline graph.\n\nThose of you who have used our pipeline graph, will be familiar with its appearance.\nThere's a series of jobs, grouped by stages, connected by a series of lines depicting the relationships between the jobs.\nBut these lines might be lying to you.\nThese lines are indiscriminately drawn between each job in a stage, regardless of their relationship.\nThese lines are placebos.\n\n![The old pipeline rendering with lines connecting every job in a stage](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/placebo-lines_old-graph.png)\n\nThis wasn't a problem to begin with.\nA basic pipeline has several jobs across a handful of stages.\nJobs in each stage would run parallel to each other, but each stage would run sequentially.\nIn the image shown above, all the jobs in the test stage would trigger at the same time. Once those jobs had finished, all the jobs in the build stage would trigger.\nWe used rudimentary CSS to draw lines connecting each job in one stage to each job in the next.\nThese lines weren't calculated based on their connections, but still reflected the story they were telling.\n\nSince the introduction of `needs` relationships in [v12.2](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-foss/-/issues/47063), pipelines got a bit more complicated.\nNow you could configure a job in a later stage to trigger as soon as a job in an earlier stage completed.\nLooking at our old example, we could set the API deployment to run as soon as our spec tests passed.\nThis skips the remaining tests and the entire build stage, turning our lines into pretty little liars.\n\nWe had many internal discussions about these lines, and how to show the relationships between jobs.\nThere's the [`needs` visualization](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/directed_acyclic_graph/#needs-visualization), which does an excellent job of displaying these relationships, but the main pipeline graph was still inaccurate.\nFor the past few months, we've been [refactoring the pipeline graph](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/276949), giving it a new lease of life and fixing some of its issues along the way.\nOne of those issues were the faked lines.\nIn the new version, we can accurately draw lines between jobs.\nLines that actually depict the relationships jobs have with each other.\nNow the lines no-longer lie!\n\n![The newer pipeline graph showing the correct needs links between jobs](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/placebo-lines_new-graph.png)\n\nThe above image shows an unreleased version of the pipeline graph.\nYou can see the lines drawn between the jobs to show that the `deploy:API` job can start as soon as the `rspec` job is successful.\nSomething the old lines (shown earlier in this post) would have been unable to depict.\n\nOne unfortunate downside of this is that these lines can be quite expensive to calculate.\nThey're actual DOM nodes, drawn deliberately and placed precisely.\nOn smaller graphs this isn't a problem, but some of our initial tests have found pipelines with a potential 8000+ job connections.\nThat kind of calculation would grind the browser to a halt, and nobody wants that.\n\nAt GitLab, we believe in boring solutions.\nWe make the simple change that sets us on the path towards where we want to be.\nShip it, get feedback, and iterate.\nSo that's what we did.\nIn the first phase of this rollout, we shipped the new pipeline graph with no lines connecting the jobs.\nWe don't have to worry about the expensive calculations, and we still get to roll out the refactored pipeline graph.\n\n![The current (v13.11) pipeline graph showing no links between jobs](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/placebo-lines_current-graph.png)\n\nWe know some of you will miss them, but fear not.\nBoring solutions are just technical debt if you don't iterate on them.\nSo the [improved lines are coming](https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/4509) in a future release, along with several other improvements to the pipeline graph.\nWe're already starting to roll out the new [Job Dependencies](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/298973) view which shows the jobs in a (much closer to) execution order.\nStay tuned for more updates, and watch [Sarah Groff Hennigh Palermo's talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2EKqKjB7OQ) for the technical side of this effort and a deeper dive into some of the decisions we made.\n",[754,755,756,757],"CI","frontend","agile","design",{"slug":759,"featured":13,"template":14},"placebo-lines-on-the-pipeline-graph",{"promotions":761},[762,776,787],{"id":763,"categories":764,"header":766,"text":767,"button":768,"image":773},"ai-modernization",[765],"ai-ml","Is AI achieving its promise at scale?","Quiz will take 5 minutes or less",{"text":769,"config":770},"Get your AI maturity 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