On Wed, Jun 15, 2011 at 2:42 AM, Tomasz Finc tfinc@wikimedia.org wrote:
We also need to figure out which things can afford to wait while we retool. My understanding of the Features team work is that the 20% tax is unaccounted for in the current model. I'll let Alolita speak to it, but I don't believe we've agreed to change any dates yet as a result of adding 20% time to the devs schedules.
This is certainly the case for anything mobile and special projects (offline) related. Since its a fairly new team the majority of its members are either part time contractors or are new and operating mostly on their own; this gives us a good challenge of on boarding new engineers for code review & deployment
In the Features team @WMF, we've been balancing our features development workload to ensure code reviews are consistently happening for quite a while now. Some of our team members such as Roan consistently dedicate a 20% or higher percentage of their time for code reviews. Our full-time development team is *tiny* (Trevor, NeilK being the only FT feature devs in SF). Their contribution to code review has varied. Both Roan and Trevor have helped tremendously in marathons for Release readiness (for 1.17 in recent times) where Features development went on-hold for months to support clearing the release backlog. Neil has helped on multimedia related code. The rest of features devs are part time contractors and remote but have been enormously participatory in making code review happen and getting bug quashed (Krinkle, Werdna, AaronSchulz).
We're still in conversation about how to best support a constant 20% from all foundation developers. The suggestion of 1 mandatory day a week for code review has been made. This is tough to implement since features developers are multiplexed across many projects and time zones. They have to ensure they can meet their deliverable deadlines as well as support ~20% time for code review. Trevor, Neil - please feel free to jump in and add your thoughts on this.
To support constant code-review, contributors to MW (community and foundation) have to work together long-term. I feel on-boarding of all new developers to learn best code review and deployment practices is essential to make that happen. On my request, Roan put together some excellent documentation on best practices to deploy code (http://wikitech.wikimedia.org/view/How_to_deploy_codehttp://wikitech.wikimedia.org/view/How_to_deploy_code). This has helped features developers and hopefully new community contributors to better understand the nuances of MW code deployment and develop software keeping these review guidelines in mind. If there is more knowledge that can be shared on this topic, please feel free to edit :-)
Internally i've watched/supported our engineers becoming more familiar with our deployment system and i'm eager to have more who are comfortable with this from both staff and the volunteer community.
Any and all new foundation developers (whether in features, fundraising or mobile) have been "let loose" to do code reviews after many months of practicing-by-doing peer reviews. Same for deployments.
For any community members who have suggestions or questions, please feel free to ping me. I'm always on irc. I'm looking for more community contributors who would like to get on-boarded for code review and be part of the solution :-)
HTH. Best, Alolita
On Wed, Jun 15, 2011 at 2:42 AM, Tomasz Finc tfinc@wikimedia.org wrote:
We also need to figure out which things can afford to wait while we retool. My understanding of the Features team work is that the 20% tax is unaccounted for in the current model. I'll let Alolita speak to it, but I don't believe we've agreed to change any dates yet as a result of adding 20% time to the devs schedules.
This is certainly the case for anything mobile and special projects (offline) related. Since its a fairly new team the majority of its members are either part time contractors or are new and operating mostly on their own; this gives us a good challenge of on boarding new engineers for code review & deployment
I'm really eager to fix the latter. We currently have good documentation from Roan and others at http://wikitech.wikimedia.org/view/How_to_deploy_code and we'll have a much better eco system when het deploy is out. For those of you that actively deploy code .. do we have enough documentation for someone new to learn the system? If not .. what key pieces are missing? Feel free to grab me on irc if you want to dive into this deeply or if your just curious.
Internally i've watched/supported our engineers becoming more familiar with our deployment system and i'm eager to have more who are comfortable with this from both staff and the volunteer community.
--tomasz
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