On Tue, Mar 19, 2019 at 4:16 PM Gergő Tisza <gtisza(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Mon, Mar 18, 2019 at 3:01 PM Derk-Jan Hartman <
d.j.hartman+wmf_ml(a)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).
Pine
(
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )