On Thu, Dec 3, 2015 at 1:13 PM, Oliver Keyes <okeyes(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
I have been informed MW Core no longer exists. Fair
catch ;p. But this
is software development, not Oprah - product ownership is not
something under the seat of every audience member. Someone needs to
actually own the definition. I don't mind if it's AnEng, Research,
Readership, Search, whoever, but it being an unknown and undisclosed
responsibility that falls on the shoulders of everyone is a really bad
way of doing it.
This is an organisational metric. Someone needs to own it.
We, Analytics, own the implementation of the Pageview Definition and the
application of it in our data pipeline. We even own the discussions about
the definition and we are happy to mediate between different teams (as is
happening right now on this list). What we can't possibly own is the
process that keeps the pageview definition up to date with the technical
reality. Because to do that effectively we'd have to code review every
line of code that changes how clients request data from our servers, and I
think our team isn't big enough to do that even if we did it full time.
So, we rely on our sister teams across WMF to surface changes to our
request patterns and anomalies in how those get interpreted by the Pageview
definition. We then rely on the owners of the code to make decisions in
collaboration with the Research team about the pageview definition. We're
then happy to implement those changes, test them and help the teams
understand whether or not they've accomplished what they set out to do.
An example, to be totally crystal clear. So the Android app team changed
the way it was calling the API to get different pieces of a page. They
reached out to us (awesome, thank you) and we brainstormed. We gave the
Research team a heads up and a chance to comment, but there was no
significant departure from how we handled link previews in the past, so we
used that knowledge to move forward. We then implemented a new "preview"
flag that's passed via X-Analytics, used it in our UDFs, and deployed
everything. We think this is the perfect teamwork on issues like this,
from an ownership perspective.