from my own experience, the Flow and Multimedia folks track bugs somewhere else where I can't even view or comment
Bugs and tasks are public for the Multimedia team. If you mean "bugs" in the bastardized sense of the term which is "things filed in bugzilla", then yes, the Multimedia team doesn't usually file building/refactoring tasks in bugzilla, we use mingle instead, which is public and can be commented on by everyone: http://ur1.ca/i1x3g We regularly link to our mingle cards on our mailing list updates, it's never been a secret area. I find that the mailing list is a better place for discussion, though, and we summarize in regular threads what tasks we're working on or planning to work on. In practice that's what's always happened anyway, people interested in what we're up to will reply to the detailed mailing list updates rather than comment on Mingle. Probably because Mingle's comment support is terrible.
As for actual bugs (defects) on products the Multimedia team is responsible for, they are currently tracked on bugzilla like everything else. It can happen ocassionally that we fix a bug and forget to file it in bugzilla, but generally speaking a bug/defect tracked in Mingle has a bugzilla counterpart. The existing disconnect and the fact that we sometimes forget to file a counterpart is one of the reasons we want to have a unified tool to do all the things people currently use bugzilla, mingle and trello for.
Our team will be one of the first to migrate to phabricator when the migration starts, because it will allow us to treat tasks, workload and defects in a single place. It will also give a much clearer view of what's going on to casual observers. The only reason why our team uses Mingle instead of Bugzilla for building tasks and triage is that Bugzilla offers no workload management and is often a poor fit for things that aren't defects. We're definitely not using Mingle to get things out of view (since it's public and regularly linked to), it's just that in the status quo Bugzilla alone didn't offer what we needed. I'm sure other teams use Trello and other tools for similar reasons. This is all coming from needs not covered by Bugzilla and we know very well how much that sucks in various ways, including the introduction of signup hurdles for people who want to interact with us, and the lack of discoverability, despite linking to Mingle every time we can. We certainly hope that the move to phabricator will make help people see and comment on what we're doing. Feeling like we're the only ones active on a particular tool is unhealthy for our projects, that's definitely not what we're looking for with phabricator, on the contrary.
On Mon, Aug 25, 2014 at 6:19 AM, svetlana svetlana@fastmail.com.au wrote:
On Mon, 25 Aug 2014, at 13:19, Pine W wrote:
I have heard very few people say "don't ever change the interface." I
have
heard people say "don't force an interface change on me that I don't
think
is an improvement."
VE was a good example. The sentiment of the community wasn't that VE''s concept is wrong, it's that the implementation and rollout had major deficiencies.
The MV issue is larger than than the usual editor-focused interface
change
because it impacts readers as well as editors, and there were issues with the display of licenses to readers. Personally I feel that the MV issues are fixable but the rollout should have been handled differently, and I
am
glad that the community and WMF both want to avoid repeating rollout problems again and again.
Pine
This instance is not new; https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Limits_to_configuration_changes is a historical list of similar pattern in the relationship.
They already told you that they are doing this to not lose readers, so that fundraising keeps working. Tops you can do is, like the WMF folks remarked earlier, is have community work on what it needs "from the bottom up" "grassroots" etc.
A first step here, I believe, is have the Teams track bugs in the open; from my own experience, the Flow and Multimedia folks track bugs somewhere else where I can't even view or comment (and even if I could, it being different from Bugzilla would make things harder). I'm not sure what about migration to Phabricator, but I think it's an operations style of thing (I'm yet to figure out how to get involved, but it'd make it easier for anyone to work on the new features - they are really documented on-wiki (thankfully they only internalise only bug tracking atm), although so far only in English mostly).
svetlana
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