On 3 December 2015 at 13:56, Dan Andreescu dandreescu@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Thu, Dec 3, 2015 at 1:13 PM, Oliver Keyes okeyes@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.
Sure. But in that, the answer to "who owns this?" is Analytics. It's Analytics who reached out and made sure everyone had a voice, it's Analytics brainstorming, it's Analytics implementing it, it's Analytics publicly logging it.
Again, ownership does not mean code reviewing everything or writing anything. It means making sure things get factored in. That seems to be what you're doing, here.
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