Hi everyone,
One discussion we had at the Hack-a-ton was about the continued frustration of getting features deployed to the WMF-operated sites.
Prior to Hack-a-ton, one short-term solution we started work on was consolidating the review queue into a single place: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Review_queue
That page still needs some organization and a process around it to make sure that we're actually looking at the page. However, our discussion at Hack-a-ton made it clear that even if we have a well-tuned process there, we still have features rolling off the end of that conveyor belt onto the floor.
After review, some (but not all) of the features in the review queue then need to be reviewed for checking into the deployment branch. Our short term answer to that was the deployment queue: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Deployment_queue
Even then, we're still not done. We have one more step, which is launching the feature on one or more wikis. We could also create another queue page for that. However, given the complicated workflow here, it seems that a wiki is the wrong tool to keep track of this.
My inclination at this point is to augment the list of keywords on Bugzilla, and use mediawiki.org to document the process, and as a place to stash the magical queries to pull up the right lists.
We already have the "need-review" keyword. I suggest we add two more keywords: "need-deploy" and "need-enabled". Then we add all three keywords to feature requests that need to go through the whole process before being deployed. For example, we'd add all three to this issue: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=25454
We'd then pick off the keywords as we step through the process (e.g. once it's reviewed, remove the "need-review" keyword). We could then generate three queries to get us the three queues I alluded to above: 1. Issues with all three keywords. These are features that someone would like to see deployed and launched, but needs to be reviewed first. 2. Issues with "need-deploy" and "need-enabled". These are extensions that have been reviewed, but need to be checked into the production branch 3. Issues with "need-enabled" only. These are extensions/features that just need action from ops.
Does this make sense? If so, I'll add the keywords and start documenting the process and retrofitting existing feature requests into this system.
Rob