What exactly do you mean by "critical" here? Is there time
allocated for non-critical but also non-feature work, e.g.
infrastructure/architecture design?

We consider improvements to be "critical" in the scope of the multimedia team's responsibilities. We don't want to do only hotfixes, we want to improve the code in all those areas. So yes, the idea is to allocate a third of our time in the coming year to improving those areas. We've already started working on thumbnailing code in particular (still in review) and raised the bar in terms of code quality and test coverage compared to the existing code. Until a few weeks ago we barely dedicated any time to these tasks and recently we've been able to give more focus to it. I expect that the 33% capacity goal will be achievable once the Media Viewer post-launch UX fixes are out of the way. Right now despite our prioritization efforts urgent Media Viewer tasks keep coming up, as a result of the enwiki/dewiki launch.


On Sun, Jun 8, 2014 at 4:51 AM, Faidon Liambotis <faidon@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Fabrice & team,

A bit past the goals deadline, but I hope I can still be useful :)

On Mon, Jun 02, 2014 at 04:59:05PM -0700, Fabrice Florin wrote:
> 3. Activities
> This year, we propose to invest our time on these main activities:
> • Structured Data: improve the way we store metadata — an important goal, because most other features depend on it.
> • Critical Bugs: fix urgent bugs in our infrastructure -- and become more familiar with our entire code base, including:
>   - Image scalers, Core media handling, TimedMediaHandler, Media backend storage, Media Viewer, etc.
> • Features: develop or improve user-facing projects, including:
>   - Upload Wizard -- our main user-facing project this year (includes Commons Upgrade and Modal Tool for other sites)
>   - Other Features -- Media Viewer 0.3, File Notifications, File Page, Kaltura Player Upgrade, Campaign Tools

I notice that you've split the roadmap into "critical bugs" and
"features". What exactly do you mean by "critical" here? Is there time
allocated for non-critical but also non-feature work, e.g.
infrastructure/architecture design?

Our current media infrastructure is getting old, has been traditionally
under-resourced and hence has accumulated technical debt over the years.

As an example, there are currently four RFCs related to thumbnails and
I'm sure opinions on their characterization as "critical" would vary.
Additionally, as you know, we've had some outage lately that can and
have been dealt with by deploying hotfixes, but unless we invest time on
a properly scalable & secure architecture these issues will keep
cropping up. Our thumbnailing architecture could surely use some love :)

My impression is that the team has been doing a bit of both, as time
permits; is this the plan going forward as well? I've discussed various
ideas with the team (mostly Gilles) and I know there is both the will
and the necessary combination of skill and experience to do those larger
changes, so I'm wondering if there's going to be time allocated for
this, this upcoming FY.

Thanks,
Faidon

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