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Topic on Talk:Platform Evolution/Goals

Tgr (talkcontribs)

This is a very thorough and concise document which focuses on the right problems, whoever authored it did a great job!

One thing that I feel is missing is enabling volunteers. Currently volunteer developers are not empowered to do effective work; IMO the main reasons for that are lack of documentation, lack of support, lack of training and mentoring, and lack of code review. Documentation is called out in the relevant section, code review is sort of mentioned (although the phrasing suggests that issue there is lack of automated testing, and for volunteer patches that's not the biggest problem by far, but unclear and unequitable code review responsibilities by paid staff, and lack of agreed-on review processes like SLAs), but support (in the sense of e.g. mediawiki.org's support desk) and training/mentoring are not. Those are IMO fundamental to volunteer capacity building (they affect paid staff too, especially during onboarding, but they have easy access to informal versions of most of those).

There's also the issue of the high learning curve of our development tools (Gerrit etc), although one could argue that we can't realistically make much dent in that. Standard developer environments are mentioned, but usually that's meant in a narrower sense (stuff that runs on the developer's computer).

CFloyd (WMF) (talkcontribs)

Thanks again :) A lot of people over the past few months contributed to the document.


I will expand the "Decrease time to integrate and deploying new features" to include:

- Code review processes and responsibilities

- Training, mentoring


I will expand "Decrease time to integrate and deploying new features" to include:

- Investing in developer tools


Question 1: Do you think those changes would cover most of your concerns? If not, do you have a suggestion?

Question 2: These outcomes are supposed to apply to volunteers as well as staff (The Goal is "Enable our engineers, staff, and volunteers to achieve our goals easier and faster"). Do you think that is sufficient or do you think that volunteers need called out more specifically?


Most of what you said was intended to be covered by those outcomes, we just didn't put enough time into writing the description, so thanks for pointing that out!

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