On 12/14/2012 02:17 PM, Chris McMahon wrote:

2. Decide a mobile area to focus, a way to run the sprint
and a date for it. Define also the goals and how to measure
the success of the sprint.

I'm on board too, but I would like to suggest that Michelle spearhead
this activity.

She seems to be busy...

I can put time organizing the event and promoting it but there is a key aspect YOU (defaulting to Michelle / Maryana?) need to decide:

- What problem do we want to solve with this activity?

I have some suggestions :)

I'd like for us to leverage our editing community to test out contributory features, so we can figure out where in the browser/device matrix our new experimental features (like editing, image uploads, and watchlists) break down, and whether they do so gracefully or not. In the early part of 2013, the mobile team is going to be especially focused on image uploads to meet our goal of 1,000 unique uploaders per month on mobile, so it makes sense to focus the most attention there.

In order to have a productive sprint, I'm guessing we'd need to host this session sometime in late January/February, to give the dev team time to iron out the obvious bugs and move contributory features from alpha/beta to production.

So that gives us some time to mull over the framework, decide if we want to go the synchronous/asynchronous route, do outreach, etc. :) Why don't we revisit this discussion in early January, after our next big release of features, when we'll have a bit more clarity on the product side?

Once this is clear then we can answer better how, wen and who exactly must be there doing what.

..."a way to run the sprint" is the tricky part. I think there are
basically two options: synchronous and asynchronous. Synchronous is
arguably more difficult, so lets' talk about that option first...

Synchronous test event: we did this successfully for AFTv5. Here is
the test plan that I used:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/QA/Article_Feedback_Test_Plan . That test
plan is based on ideas from "Session Based Test Management",
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Session-based_testing (Just btw, the
software testing articles on enwiki are pretty awful, someday I'd like
to clean them all up, but it's a big job)

I borrowed a lot of details for synchronous test events from the Weekend
Testing Americas group. They found some time ago that Saturdays from
10AM-1PM Pacific time is generally more successful than other times.
We had a dedicated test environment and an irc channel. Everyone worked
at the same time and collaborated on IRC simultaneously, and it was more
fun than you might imagine.

Asynchronous test event: For a period of time (a day? a week?) I'm not
sure...) everyone participating is testing on their own, pending
whatever collaboration they can create among themselves I guess. I
think a test plan with "charters" would be required for an async test
event, as well as a coordinator to field information, feedback,
questions, etc. from participants. I think Yuvi has done this before
for mobile, but I don't know any details.

Again, without deciding the problem we want to solve it is difficult to find the perfect answer to this.

In general I think an approach like this could work:

* We have one big goal and then other little goals related.

* Each goal has some tasks defined.

* Some of the tasks can be started and eventually completed by anybody anywhere. We open the gates for those asap, identifying who can help volunteers here and on IRC.

* As the sprint day approaches we can see what hard nuts haven't been solved yet, what tasks benefit from synchronous collaboration.

* The goals of the sprint day (end eventually the agenda, if any is needed) will be come clear as the date approaches.

* Then the sprint day is today and we all do our best.

* After that some of us still need to have energy and time in the following days to process the useful data in the relevant wiki pages, write the blog post and close the activity properly.

--
Quim Gil
Technical Contributor Coordinator @ Wikimedia Foundation
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil

--
Maryana Pinchuk
Associate Product Manager, Wikimedia Foundation
wikimediafoundation.org