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Engineering Community Team/Meetings/2013-01-29

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January 29

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Current activities

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Re visual editor test event: goal: get it done, and get good diversity across languages/geographies.

  • Chris says: find real issues & engage with real users
  • Future activities - we'll have goals & measures for success

Bug management:

FOSDEM slides & icon discussion

Volunteer alignment

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Discussion starting at thread "Alignment of volunteer developers (was: Re: Status and next steps for Volunteer product managers)"

  • Do we add "does this align with movement goals?" into code review guidelines? how?
  • Aligning volunteers with movement goals (often also Foundation goals) is a metagoal for ECT
  • The teams who are working on very high priority goals say they don't have the bandwidth to get more feedback & help from community
    • We ought to fix that!
  • Look in Spring 2011 https://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Product_Whitepaper -- discussing "red links" that the community is best placed to do. Can we help community work on that?
    • How up-to-date is that? Can we still work off this?
    • The two red links that aren't undergoing development are still worth thinking about.
    • Since the WMF prioritized some projects, the others might be considered "leftovers" - what about getting volunteers more involved in making yearly eng roadmap?
  • We have Krenair on Echo; we have Parsoid team interested in teaching other people how to work on Parsoid; we have Siebrand & Quim who pushed for VE testing on non-Latin character sets, along with VE team
  • The red links are big projects - we have trouble coordinating those. What if the big projects depend on these things in MW core?
    • We need to work on the little things! Decrease friction for skilled developers
    • Permissions/+2, and code review.
    • What if some patches are languishing because of alignment problems? Some patches seem like a distraction.
    • Volunteers can get more effective by learning to align themselves with project goals
  • Flow, Athena, Global Profiles ... not as accessible
  • Admin tools, Lua, & other Platform projects - RobLa promises to work with you!
  • We have made big improvements re transparency of what we are doing. But it's hard for people outside WMF to know what are upcoming open tasks on a project.

Some of our developers are already intimidated by the idea & process of doing code review

  • There could be a tradeoff of slowdown in code review if we add the responsibility of checking alignment
  • Maybe wait on that discussion till after this LevelUp round, in which more people will get code review training

We should talk to Chris Steipp about this in late February Next week: talk more about this and come up with next steps

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