The analytics team tracks all of their day to day work in Mingle, a project management tool. Recently the foundation has migrated Mingle hosting from our own Office IT server to a Thoughtworks server. The only thing that changed is the address. This is the new Mingle address:
https://wikimedia.mingle.thoughtworks.com/projects/analytics/overview
And this is the old mingle address that is now read-only:
Hi,
On Thu, Dec 12, 2013 at 12:59:30PM -0500, Dan Andreescu wrote:
Recently the foundation has migrated Mingle hosting from our own Office IT server to a Thoughtworks server.
I know that Dan is not responsible for this, but does this mean we salvaged not only hacker ethics [1] #2 Openness, but also #3 Decentralization to Mingle? :-(
But I guess that's somewhat out of our team's control :-/
Meh. Maybe we did not have #3 with the Office IT server either?
Best regards, Christian
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hacker_ethic&oldid=566989543#T...
I know that Dan is not responsible for this, but does this mean we salvaged not only hacker ethics [1] #2 Openness, but also #3 Decentralization to Mingle? :-(
I don't live by that code personally, but I agree that Mingle violates all sorts of my own principles. The problem is, the alternatives are not awesome:
* hack mingle-like capability into something like Redmine * stop using the process we spent three months as a team hammering out
That second one seems more and more likely as I'm actually the only team member that was around when we did that... :/
On Dec 13, 2013 12:24 PM, "Dan Andreescu" dandreescu@wikimedia.org wrote:
- stop using the process we spent three months as a team hammering out
Is that process/workflow/criteria at least written down somewhere so someone could start hunting for a replacement without needing too much help from the team?
-Jeremy
On 12/13/2013 09:37 AM, Jeremy Baron wrote:
On Dec 13, 2013 12:24 PM, "Dan Andreescu" <dandreescu@wikimedia.org mailto:dandreescu@wikimedia.org> wrote:
- stop using the process we spent three months as a team hammering out
Is that process/workflow/criteria at least written down somewhere so someone could start hunting for a replacement without needing too much help from the team?
For what is worth:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project_management_tools
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/teampractices/2013-December/000205.html
Is that process/workflow/criteria at least written down somewhere so someone could start hunting for a replacement without needing too much help from the team?
Yes, we have a slide deck that talks about it. We could move it on-wiki if anyone's interested. Here's a rough high level description:
Epics are high level things that our stakeholders would like us to focus on. By stakeholders we mean the community, people in WMF, etc. Every quarter, we prioritize the Epics that we'll focus on. We break down prioritized Epics into Features and gather medium-level requirements there. We then decide to do Features as part of Sprints (two week work periods). When we do that, we break down the features into Tasks. Features, tasks, and epics have statuses that they move through according to a few simple rules. Features are estimated in points and that's how we figure out what we can do in a given period of time.
This is pretty standard for agile, and most freemium and for-pay tools let you implement this process. But, out-of-the-box, Redmine, Trac, Bugzilla, etc. are not easy to beat into submission.
For what is worth:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project_management_tools
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/teampractices/2013-December/000205.html
Personally, I'd love to move to something like github + gitban or Phabricator. I value user experience over the hacker ethics but Mingle kind of fails me on both :) However, we've invested a lot into our process and there were some very good reasons for that. So, for now, I think we have bigger and simpler fish to fry.
Hope that helps, but feel free to ask anything if you're interested.
On 12/13/2013 08:48 AM, Christian Aistleitner wrote:
Hi,
On Thu, Dec 12, 2013 at 12:59:30PM -0500, Dan Andreescu wrote:
Recently the foundation has migrated Mingle hosting from our own Office IT server to a Thoughtworks server.
I know that Dan is not responsible for this, but does this mean we salvaged not only hacker ethics [1] #2 Openness, but also #3 Decentralization to Mingle? :-(
But I guess that's somewhat out of our team's control :-/
Andre and Guillaume are trying to restart the discussion about our project management tools in a well-organized way. See http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/teampractices/2013-December/000205.html (this mailing list is public, if anyone is interested) and https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Project_management_tools .
The goals as I understand them are to:
* Find tools that can meet most (if not all) our teams' needs and processes * Reduce the number of tools people have to switch between * Reduce our dependence on proprietary software
Matt Flaschen