Hello Discovery,

Management is requesting that foundation engineering teams consider tracking how much time we are spending on "maintenance" vs. "new work". As a first step in that direction, we have been asked to categorize our work into those two buckets. This should not require a lot of effort, and for most of you (non leads) won't require any effort at all, at least for now. But I wanted you to be aware of it.

You'll start to see phab tasks tagged with one of two new tags, which will probably be #WorkTypeMaintenance and #WorkTypeNewFunctionality. You can ignore them in your day-to-day work.

The idea is to experiment with this approach for a while, and then evaluate whether it should be continued, modified, or dropped.

Kevin Smith Agile Coach, Wikimedia Foundation