On Tue, Mar 19, 2019 at 4:16 PM Gergő Tisza gtisza@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, Mar 18, 2019 at 3:01 PM Derk-Jan Hartman < d.j.hartman+wmf_ml@gmail.com> wrote:
Last year has seen a lot of focus on Technical Debt. WMF also has a core platform team now, which finally allows a more sustainable chipping away
at
some of the technical debt.
Yeah. Having tech debt is never great but what gets people concerned is when it just grows and grows, and management dismisses concerns because it is always more important to have the next feature out quickly. We used to have a bit of that problem, but IMO there have been lots of positive changes in the last two years or so, and there is now a credible organization-wide effort now to get debt under control (mainly looking at the Platform Evolution program here). Having the core platform team also helped a lot, and in my impression some other teams that had in the past focused on fast feature iteration have also been given more space to do things right.
Thanks very much for the explanations regarding that point.
One of my continuing concerns is that, as far as I know, no one has a way of reliably quantifying the scale of the technical debt or measuring how it is changing over time. It sounds like the internal view in WMF is that the situation is improving, which is good to hear. However, I would prefer to have a way to measure technical debt and how it is changing. If that information is available then I think that making decisions about resources, priorities, etc. will involve less guesswork. I think that this proposal could align with WMF's work on code health.(See https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Code_Health).