[teampractices] Upcoming phab changes

[Kevin Smith]

The "next" release of phabricator (scheduled for this Wednesday) is
expected to have a lot of big changes. I'm not sure when it will happen,
but the changes keep adding up.

Some people will be excited by the new "Forms" feature, which (as I
understand it) kind of sets up a template to structure the descriptions of
certain types of tasks.

Others are more interested in the integration of Story Points as a core
phab field. This new field will only allow numeric values (no more "Big" as
an estimate). The plan is to deprecate the existing sprint extension, as
enough of its functionality will be built into phab (with the remainder in
phragile). Speaking of phragile, it may be broken by this change,
unless/until the new field is exposed through phab's API.

What triggered this email, however, was that someone noticed over the
weekend that tasks added to a board now default to the *bottom* of the
column, rather than the *top*. Personally I think that's a good change, but
it was unexpected, and could be an unpleasant surprise for a lot of people,
unless they are told about it.

This upgrade also fixes a lot of longstanding bugs and frustrations, so
hooray for that. I don't know what other behavioral changes it has that
aren't related to the main big features.

Hopefully we can figure out an effective plan to communicate all these
changes to interested parties.

For more info:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/conpherence/308/
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Phabricator/Feb_2016_Upgrade
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T120013


Kevin Smith
Agile Coach, Wikimedia Foundation
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