[teampractices] Project management tools review: Regressions/tradeoffs; migration

[Andre Klapper]

Hi,

as I (being in charge of Bugzilla) was asked: 
I am fine with moving away from Bugzilla once we have found something
working "reasonable well" for "us". These two terms need defining,
though. 

I'm sharing this to create awareness. Some stuff is general, but I
mostly refer to Phabricator (which seems to be the favorite currently in
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project_management_tools/Review/Options )


1) "us" (Personas)

So far, focus was on discussing the needs of developers, maintainers and
managers.
But we also have users/reporters, triagers/bugwrangler, and the tech
admin in a tracking/planning tool.

We'll need to agree which tradeoffs/regressions are acceptable (we don't
care fixing them before migrating to a specific tool), and which are not
(must get fixed before migrating), keeping other personas in mind.
In any case I will have to make sure that upstream tickets for such
issues are created.


1.1) Users

User/reporter experience is to further discuss if we continue to want
users to be able to report issues directly into the tool. 
If we don't want, we'd need to discuss with CLs how to support other
feedback channels properly for the community.

I obviously still need to do more homework by reading docs and playing
more, but for example:
* Can we set up Phabricator *by default* to allow read access to tickets
("Visible to: Public (No Login Required)")?
* When filing a ticket, how to get a list of all products? Type-ahead
AJAX ("Projects: Type a project name") is not very usable if you don't
know all product names by heart already.
* How can a user express interest on a ticket? (cf. voting, watching)


1.2) Bugwrangler Tasks

For my work, some examples:
* have not found an equivalent for some helpful queries, e.g. "no
comment on the ticket by anybody else than the reporter".
* Show the date of the last change in the list of query results
* Popularity statistics (tickets with most duplicates etc.)


1.3) General

* How to do cross-component tagging ("keywords"): If nothing similar
exists, use dependencies? Are keywords important to us?


2) Migration

I expect this to be complicated. And I appreciate proving me wrong.
Tickets themselves, Attachments, Access restrictions
( https://secure.phabricator.com/T3820 ), Priorities, Assignees, User
accounts and their passwords. 
Mapping products and components.
 
I'm not aware of any precedents. 
I asked on IRC if there's any migration code available (Facebook once
migrated from Bugzilla to Phabricator) and was pointed to
https://secure.phabricator.com/T3179 : 
Phabricator has an API ("Conduit") and Blender project imported from
Sourceforge/GitHub and attached their scripts. We have people in the
community who imported from Sourceforge to Bugzilla (Merlijn).

Somebody would have to write migration code and test it thoroughly.


3) Bugwrangler role/scope; Tech maintenance

WMF's bugwrangler role would likely change to more bug report handling
and less tracking/planning tool code maintenance.
Somebody would have to work on the new tool's code to make it fit our
needs, obviously.


Cheers,
andre
-- 
Andre Klapper | Wikimedia Bugwrangler
http://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper/