Hello Everyone,
I am working on improving developer productivity! Specifically, I am aiming to improve the local development environment.
Satisfaction with the local development environment got the second lowest score in the developer satisfaction survey, and we (Release Engineering) would like to find out which things about it you like, and which are troublesome. In order to do so, we need your help! I’d love to have the opportunity to interview you about your local setup and/or observe how you interact with it.
Please send me an email if you’d like to participate, and I or one of my colleagues will schedule some time with you.
I’m looking forward to our conversations. This is a chance for you to shape the local development environment, so please don’t hold back :)
Outcomes resulting from the interviews (non personally identifiable information) will be made available after analysis has been completed.
Great to see this happen!
Given the large variance in people's local development environments, which is surely impossible to fully capture via interviews, I'm wondering if there will be some less time-intensive and more inclusive alternative way for providing input?
Hi Gergo,
Thanks for voicing your concerns!
This is just one step in the information gathering process. I actually started out by looking through the Developer Satisfaction survey. I did consider sending out another survey, but ended up choosing the interview method for this step because I’d like to get a deeper look into how people work and the problems they face, which is difficult to glean from surveys.
I think it’s unlikely we’ll be able to fully capture every local development variation. Still, I’d like to be as inclusive as possible and enable anyone who wants to respond to do so. I can definitely consult with the team on sending out an additional survey tailored to local development. Did you have another method in mind?
On Tue, Jan 8, 2019 at 3:13 PM Gergo Tisza gtisza@wikimedia.org wrote:
Great to see this happen!
Given the large variance in people's local development environments, which is surely impossible to fully capture via interviews, I'm wondering if there will be some less time-intensive and more inclusive alternative way for providing input?
On Tue, Jan 8, 2019 at 4:03 PM Jeena Huneidi jhuneidi@wikimedia.org wrote:
I did consider sending out another survey, but ended up choosing the interview method for this step because I’d like to get a deeper look into how people work and the problems they face, which is difficult to glean from surveys.
To be clear I think a primary focus on interviews as a method that gives deeper insights than other options makes perfect sense (and I really am glad that they are happening :). I just think it might be nice to have something to complement them.
I think it’s unlikely we’ll be able to fully capture every local
development variation. Still, I’d like to be as inclusive as possible and enable anyone who wants to respond to do so. I can definitely consult with the team on sending out an additional survey tailored to local development. Did you have another method in mind?
One option is to just put up a wiki page with some instructions on what kind of information and insights you are looking for, and then people can go into whatever level of detail suits them. That requires very little effort on your side and evaluation can happen collaboratively. (Also it might be interesting information even apart from this project.) OTOH asking people to share their answers publicly has its own barriers to inclusion. The other option would be to do it as a free-form survey, but then you'd be the only one able to process them, so depending on how many people actually take the chance to respond, it might not be a realistic workload.
Hi Everyone,
Thank you for participating in the local development environment interviews! I was able to get a much better idea of what changes could give you the highest impact in terms of satisfaction as we move to create a development environment that more closely matches production while being mindful of your needs.
Here are the most common issues I found:
- You’d like an environment that is simple to use and easy to set up, and doesn’t require much maintenance from you. - You get lost in the documentation, or sometimes can’t find it, and assistance isn’t readily available when things go wrong. - You also find your current environment takes up too many resources and runs too slowly. - You have a hard time managing your environment configuration(s). - You can find it difficult to share your work with other parties
The most requested features were:
- Production-like test/dev environments - Real content
You can find more details on the Mediawiki Developer Satisfaction page[0].
Initially, I (and others) will be working on a local development environment to address these problems. This will be a gradual and iterative effort, so not all issues will be solved right away. I hope to release it to a group of testers as soon as we have made sufficient progress.
We plan to try a Docker/Kubernetes based implementation, possibly building upon preexisting works. If you have ideas you’d like to share, please feel free to discuss them on the talk page[1].
If you have any concerns, please let me know.
[0]. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Developer_Satisfaction [1]. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Developer_Satisfaction
Jeena
On Tue, Jan 8, 2019 at 2:14 PM Jeena Huneidi jhuneidi@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hello Everyone,
I am working on improving developer productivity! Specifically, I am aiming to improve the local development environment.
Satisfaction with the local development environment got the second lowest score in the developer satisfaction survey, and we (Release Engineering) would like to find out which things about it you like, and which are troublesome. In order to do so, we need your help! I’d love to have the opportunity to interview you about your local setup and/or observe how you interact with it.
Please send me an email if you’d like to participate, and I or one of my colleagues will schedule some time with you.
I’m looking forward to our conversations. This is a chance for you to shape the local development environment, so please don’t hold back :)
Outcomes resulting from the interviews (non personally identifiable information) will be made available after analysis has been completed.
-- Jeena Huneidi Software Engineer, Release Engineering Wikimedia Foundation
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org