[teampractices] "Maintenance" vs "New work"

[Kevin Smith]

On Fri, Aug 7, 2015 at 12:17 PM, James Forrester <jforrester at wikimedia.org>
wrote:

> On 7 August 2015 at 11:57, Kevin Smith <ksmith at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
>> 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.
>>
>> ​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.​​
>
>
It would be interesting to get the percentages from different teams. My
perception (could be wrong) is that Discovery does almost nothing to "keep
the lights on" (that is, keep the site running assuming nothing
interferes). And I would guess (wild hand-wavey guess) that "maintenance"
might be something like 10 or 20% of their time. As an aside, the team is
actively trying to streamline the time/effort that restarts take, to reduce
that maintenance burden.

If all of that were to be  true, it would fit within my "hopefully not
much".

I also go back to the "bug vs. feature" distinction. Discovery is spending
a lot of time improving search. Is that maintenance, or new features? I'm
saying it's new features, because it is innovation aimed at meeting a
quarterly goal.

So I'm not yet sure if we are agreeing or disagreeing.

Kevin
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