[teampractices] "Maintenance" vs "New work"

[James Forrester]

On 7 August 2015 at 11:57, Kevin Smith <ksmith at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> For most software development teams, there should be some (hopefully not
> too much) maintenance, and the bulk of the effort (in theory) should go
> toward new functionality.
>
> And (and this is the main point of this email), for most software
> development teams, "keep the lights on" should be near zero, right? So
> effectively most of the teams we work with would mostly need to track 2
> buckets (maintenance and new features), and if the third bucket is
> substantial, that would indicate a problem.
>
> As for bugs vs. features: We have had requests from teams to add features
> to phabricator to distinguish between the two. So while I personally don't
> find that distinction helpful, there are people within engineering who do.
>

​Sure, but WMF doesn't have "software development teams" in this language
(except in the ​case of the mobile apps teams). We have teams responsible
for supporting software as used on a particular cluster/site. Running the
site – be it unplanned fixes or scheduled maintenance –  is absolutely the
most important thing we do, and a very significant part of our workload.​​

​J.​
-- 
James D. Forrester
Lead Product Manager, Editing
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

jforrester at wikimedia.org | @jdforrester
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