Hi everyone,
I’d like to announce an organizational change at Wikimedia Foundation in the Platform Engineering group. For those that aren't terribly interested in how WMF's org chart looks, you can skip the rest of this email. :-)
Yesterday, we formalized “Release Engineering” as a team, and promoted Greg Grossmeier to “Release Team Manager” with everyone on the team reporting to him.
In addition to Greg, the new team comprises: * Antoine Musso * Chris McMahon * Dan Duvall * Mukunda Modell * Rummana Yasmeen * Sam Reed * Zeljko Filipin
They are broadly responsible for the lifecycle of code from the point that a developer is ready to check it in through its deployment on our site, maintaining the processes and tools that reduce negative user impact of site software changes while simultaneously making software change deployment efficient and joyful.
On a more detailed level, here’s just a few things the group is responsible for: * Code and bug report hosting - currently Gerrit and Bugzilla, but in the glorious future, Phabricator * Test infrastructure - the team maintains the Beta Cluster, with help from TechOps * Test automation - building the Cucumber/RSpec-based infrastructure for automating browser tests * Manual testing - actually looking at the product and making sure it does what all the robots tell us it should be doing * Test tools - tools that developers can use to test their own code such as Vagrant * Deployment tooling - the infrastructure we use to push code out to production, like scap
More information about the team can be found here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Release_and_QA_Team
You may notice that that page has been around a while (August 2013). Greg and Chris McMahon have been leading this as a “virtual team” for the past year, with a shared goal-setting and day-to-day organization. This has demonstrated that there is a strong case for creating a formalized team.
Please join me in congratulating Greg and wishing the newly formalized team continued success!
Rob