On Mon, Jun 13, 2011 at 11:39 PM, Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
To keep the ball rolling, I've started a draft
here, based in part on
your comments:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Development_process_improvement/20%25_policy
As a quick update, yesterday we had a conversation to think about how
we can make this real. In this discussion, the participants were the
Engineering Program Managers, Sumana and me. If you want the
play-by-play, you can see Sumana's notes here:
http://etherpad.wikimedia.org/Dev-Process-Improvement
The high level summary is that within the management group, there's
consensus that this is a good idea, and that we need to make it real
ASAP, principally within the parameters of the aforementioned policy
page.
The practical barriers are that we 1) need to ensure that we're not
adding to people's existing massive workload without taking something
off, in order to do this, 2) we need to plan for skills development
related to code review and deployment.
With regard to 1), managers are beginning conversations with their
reports with regard to project allocation, and we're working towards
getting every full-time engineer freed up ASAP to make that 20%
commitment.
With regard to 2), RobLa and Sumana are starting to think about a code
review/deployment boot camp (more WMF-focused than a hackathon, but
ideally with some options for remote participation) -- again, see the
notes for what's been discussed so far; Rob's going to talk more about
this in a couple of weeks or so (he's off next week).
All best,
Erik
--
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
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