Engineering Community Team/Meetings/2013-02-19

Feb 19 2013

(Micro)tasks for volunteers to get involved

https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/11/21/lead-development-process-product-adviser-manager/ listed the following areas:

• File storage, especially regarding Wikimedia Commons.
• Prioritizing shell requests.
• Operations requests from the community.
• Data dumps. (ariel, maria)
• Wikimedia Labs / Beta cluster (Sumana, Chris McM.)
• Admin tools development (Chris Steipp, James F.)
• Search (prioritizing bug list?)
• Lua
• Flagged Revs?

Open questions:

• Do we focus on those areas and leave the other Wikimedia engineering activities for later? Do we want to push all engineering groups towards maintaining "Get involved" sections and tasks for all projects, or do we want to do this push in Platform only for the moment because that's where Rob has authority?

  Sumana: Features, language and mobile already sort of have product managers; the areas that remain (platform, ops & offline) are the areas where product help is most needed

  And possibly accessibility

• Is the list above still up-to-date? e.g.:
  • Are shell requests & ops requests now handled by Andre and his team of triagers?

    shell requests: basically no change, they get tagged with that keyword and then volunteers can pick up and create a gerrit patchset. Nothing triageteam-specific. -- andre

    Meeting every fortnight with mutante & aklapper re "ops" keyword.

    Re shell: changesets made by volunteers, Sam usually deploys it

  • James Forrester is listed as product manager for Admin tools: is help still needed?

    Sumana says yes

  • Lua isn't on the list; do we consider that Kozuch is handling this on his own? Or do we still want to have a list of tasks

    Kozuch is on this.

    He needs a list of tasks.

  • Would it make sense to add "bug management" and "QA" to the list? i.e. not necessarily to Product-manage those activities, but to have a list of tasks for volunteers?

    Makes sense to point to existing TODO lists

    +1 - Quim

• Once we have an up-to-date list, we need contacts for each activity, i.e. people we can reach out to to maintain the list of tasks. For example, on "File storage", we need to ask the person in charge what exactly they need help with. And we need to do that for every single activity we want tasks for.
  • Sumana suggest to use the "Maintainers" list to know who to ask for each activity

In a nutshell, what we need is:

• An up-to-date list of activities that need help
• At least 1 contact for each activity with whom we can work to create and maintain a list of tasks

Have a discussion with Howie, James F. about volunteer involvement in product development

• Ask James: what are you working on?
• It is probably better to have less items / products and focus on getting PMs for those, as opposed to have a wide collection that we can't handle ourselves.
  • I think previous discussions established that we want to encourage "come and go" tasks instead of formal PM roles
    • OK, but it needs to be clear for ourselves what products are top priority and we are active, and then the rest.
      • agreed

Agenda for quarterly review for 26 February

Questions to address (agenda) http://etherpad.wmflabs.org/pad/p/ECT-weekly

1. What BENEFITS have we already offered the organization? (where ECT has moved the needle)

https://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Product_Whitepaper

https://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Plan/Movement_Priorities#Goals

1. What LESSONS have we learned?
2. What INPUT are we seeking? (list)
3. What TIMELINE are we planning for the next 3 months?
4. Q&A/discussion.

Travel next week

• Now's a good time to reach out to people in SF and arrange to meet with them

Bugzilla admin rights

Come up with guidelines and requirements who should be Bugzilla admin and why. Nothing in place currently, number growing -> coordination and security issue, plus do non-employees need an NDA? RFC planned for later this week by Andre.

The Wheel

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:Calendar Is this going well?

• Are we making sure everyone knows who's in charge of what and the calendar is clear?
• Are we trying to do too much (and therefore losing quality)?

Let's look again in 4 weeks.

Need to balance scalability in getting contributors & one-on-one contact

Last week, ran a very low-key AFT test (they have a test env) - didn't get attention from outsiders Not every software project is amenable to testing on a monthly schedule.

• Quim & Chris to talk about this

How we prioritize what features to test

Who's working on the process for ensuring we test a variety of features and balance testability, urgency, movement goals, etc.? (Including exploratory testing & test automation)

Delayed till next week.