Reading/Multimedia/Meetings/Next Cycle 1 Q1 2014-15

MULTIMEDIA NEXT CYCLE PLANNING: 2014-15 - Q1 - Cycle 1
Meeting Notes - July 21, 2014

The Wikimedia Foundation's multimedia team held planning meetings for our next development cycle on July 21, 2014 in San Francisco. Here are our notes, prepared collaboratively on this shared notepad.

Participants

Gilles Dubuc - engineering team lead
Fabrice Florin - product manager, host
Mark Holmquist - frontend engineer
Gergo Tisza - backend engineer

Agenda

Goals for Next 6-week Cycle
Current Cycle Review
Capacity of the team
Estimate New Stories
Estimate Backlog
Select Tasks for this Cycle

Discussion

Goals for Next Cycle

Review this Next Cycle's goals (10 mins).

Our next development cycle starts on July 23 and ends on September 2.

For this 6-week cycle, we plan to focus on our next two big projects this year: Upload Wizard and Structured Data — while tracking key metrics, addressing critical bugs -- as well as final Media Viewer tasks and Wikimania discussions.

We propose to invest our time between these main projects:

Upload Wizard - planning and refactoring (bug fixes, metrics, discussions, code review)
Structured Data - planning with Wikidata and community (discussions, design, specifications)
Multimedia Metrics - upload funnel analysis, Media Viewer opt-in/out data
Critical Bugs / Tech Debt - fix serious issues that need quick solutions (e.g. thumbnails)
Media Viewer - viewing options panel, opt in/out metrics, bug fixes, wrap-up tasks
Wikimania - hackathon, discussions, presentation, roundtable

Note: We plan to skip a sprint during Wikimania, as most of the team will be busy that week.

See this updated Mingle wall for what is now our current cycle.

Current Cycle Results

Review Current Cycle achievements and overall performance (15 mins).

Key accomplishments:
- released Media Viewer on all wikis (22+ million global image views/day !)
- developed new metrics to track Media Viewer opt-outs, Upload Wizard drop-off rates
- developed final features and bug fixes based on community feedback (e.g. view original file, attribution credits)
- solved critical bugs and technical debt for other multimedia tools (e.g. Image Scalers, GW Toolset, TimedMediaHandler)
- started Upload Wizard project: planning, bug fixes, code review, refactoring, metrics, user feedback, designs
- started Structured Data project: planning, research, mockups, discussions with Wikidata

We completed about 113 points in the last 6 weeks (vs. 112 points in previous cycle)

Team Capacity

Estimate Capacity of the team in this Next Cycle (5 mins).

Estimated capacity : ~14 points/ week = ~70 points for the Next Cycle (a bit less because of Wikimania and Gergo vacation)

Next Cycle Estimates

Estimate Stories proposed for this Next Cycle and come up with the final list based on the estimations and capacity of the team (30min).

Estimate Backlog left for Current Cycle
Identify top candidates for Next Cycle
Estimate new tasks under consideration for Next Cycle

Next Cycle Tasks

Determine which Tasks to take on for the Next Cycle, and which to push back to Subsequent or other Cycles (15 mins).

Reach team consensus on top priorities
Move relevant tasks over to the Next Cycle for development
Push back other tasks over to Subsequent Cycle or later
Adjust above goals as needed
See updated Mingle wall

Our Current Cycle wall now includes separate columns for Media Viewer (4.5 points), Metrics (13.5 points), Structured Data (6 points), Tech Debt (12 points) and Upload Wizard (12 points) -- or a total of about 48 points. We expect to take on more tasks which have not yet been estimated in these categories.

Here are some examples of tasks we plan to take on in this cycle.

Metrics

Upload Wizard Metrics & Funnel Analysis (#305, #541, #603, #587)
Media Viewer Opt-in/out (#735, #793)

Upload Wizard

We have started planning and development on Upload Wizard, which will be our main user-facing project in the coming year. For now, we are focusing on metrics, feedback, bug fixes, unit tests, code refactoring and a few small user interface improvements.

Here are some of the tasks we plan to take on this cycle:

Upload Bugs (e.g. #132 PHP Fatal error and related)
Analyze user feedback for Upload Wizard (#624)
Code Refactoring Plan (#344)

To learn more, check out this updated project page.

Structured Data

We are starting to work with the Wikidata team to plan this project, which aims to provide machine-readable data for media files on Wikimedia Commons.

Our main activities this cycle include:

Planning meetings with Wikidata
Mockups and schemas for a new metadata structure
Community discussions to understand user needs and workflows
Definitions for a high-level class for image metadata

To learn more, check out this new project page.

Critical Bugs / Tech Debt

We will continue to allocate about a third of our time to address urgent bugs and technical debt to gradually improve our multimedia infrastructure.

Here are some tasks we are considering for this cycle:

Pre-render thumbnails in all sizes on the back-end (#301)
InstantCommons broken for some images (#131)
Write unit tests for GW Toolset (#608)
Create vagrant role for Commons (#632)

To learn more, click on the relevant cards in our Technical Debt wall.

Media Viewer

We will keep working on critical features or bug fixes for Media Viewer, as requested by community members. Here are some remaining tasks we plan to take on this cycle:

Viewing Options Panel (#787)
Viewing Options Dashboard (#793)
Set up tri-state preferences for Media Viewer (#807)
Add suffix to file names in Media Viewer (#798)
Show pop-up warning for old computers / slow connections (#717)
Improve documentation (#576)

Wikimania

Preparation tasks:

Prepare slides
Rehearse presentation
Invite roundtable participants

Scheduled sessions: http://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/multimedia-wikimania-2014

For a roadmap of our goals for these projects in future cycles, visit this planning page for 2014-2015.