Hi folks,
this is a heads-up that Tomasz, Rob, Alolita, CT, Brion, Roan[TBC],
Howie and I will be meeting with ThoughtWorks (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThoughtWorks ) Thursday and Friday. Rob
and I also got a download from Tim ahead of time.
ThoughtWorks has done great work with the fundraising developers
(Arthur, Katie, Kaldari) already in helping protect that team from
distractions, prioritize its work, and ensure that
roles/responsibilities are clearly understood vis-a-vis the
fundraising folks in the community department. So, we're now exploring
a deeper engagement with ThoughtWorks on problem-solving across the
engineering organization.
Following initial conversations, the purpose of the meeting tomorrow
is to do a deep-dive into a specific problem set: the code review,
deployment and release management process. We'll be digging into
questions like:
1) What are the best methods to ensure we keep up with the backlog
while still maintaining a good clip of WMF priority development;
2) What's a realistic deployment and release cycle to shoot for (for
trunk, extensions, branches);
3) How do we dissipate key skills more widely among both staff and
volunteers (e.g. deployment, security reviews);
4) How/when can we split "big hairy projects" with integration issues
into more manageable chunks;
5) What other high priority improvements do we need to prioritize
(e.g. increased test coverage, improvements to the testing frameworks,
het-deploy, staging environments, etc.)
We're intentionally keeping this first meeting at a manageable size to
have a high face-to-face throughput and to explore where ThoughtWorks
can best help us. But I'm very much intending to make our thinking
public, and to form clear and visible groups around core problems
we're tackling, just as we have been doing with all WMF engineering
projects. So, I'll keep you posted, and if you have thoughts that
you'd like to post ahead of time, please do it onlist or offlist :-)
Thanks,
Erik
--
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate