[teampractices] "Maintenance" vs "New work"

[Katie Horn]

Speaking just for Fundraising Tech:

If you define maintenance as anything you have to do to preserve key
functionality you already have, most of the work we do is easily qualified
as maintenance.

Our main focus is on maintaining integrations with third party payment
processors, and those third parties are constantly changing their products.
Sometimes this is improvement on their end which triggers required action
on our end, but it can also be an industry-wide rushed response to
something like international cross-border payment laws changing. The latter
happens more often than you might think.

I don't think it can be overstated that what I'm trying to underline here
is not fundamentally a "tech debt" thing. This is a "having to quickly
adjust everything we do in order to continue to successfully hit all the
moving targets" thing... which, if we have a rushed surprise timeline,
usually results in an increased amount of tech debt as a byproduct.

I think we can safely assume that any team that relies on any kind of third
party integration for one or more of their features to continue working,
will have some degree of the same situation.

-Katie

On Mon, Aug 10, 2015 at 9:14 AM, Kevin Smith <ksmith at wikimedia.org> wrote:

>
> On Fri, Aug 7, 2015 at 1:55 PM, Greg Grossmeier <greg at wikimedia.org>
> wrote:
>
>> Whereas I think RelEng is probably[0] closer to only 20% in "new".
>>
>
> RelEng and Ops are the groups that to me are pretty obviously heavily
> weighted toward "keep the lights on" and "maintain in the face of external
> forces (e.g. upgrades)". Wherever the mw-core work went might also fall
> into that category, and there may be others.
>
> But I would hope that most if not all of the various teams within Reading,
> Editing, Discovery, and FR would have relatively low burdens in the
> "maintenance" areas, and therefore (mathematically) would have a stronger
> focus on "new development" (which for the purposes of this paragraph
> includes enhancing existing features).
>
> Am I wrong, and there are actually Reading, Editing, or Discovery groups
> which spend massive amounts of time on "maintenance"?
>
> Kevin
>
>
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