This was written with the WMF Engineering staff as the audience in mind, but it has equally important points for all mediawiki/wikimedia developers.

----- Forwarded message from Greg Grossmeier greg@wikimedia.org -----

Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2015 13:44:54 -0700 From: Greg Grossmeier greg@wikimedia.org To: Development and Operations engineers engineering@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: What to know before next week's shortening of the deploy cadence

All:

Next week we start the shortened deploy schedule. This means that code you write and merge into master will get to all of our users quicker than it has before.

There are a few things I need to share with everyone so that we're all on the same page about expectations.

1. The first week or so might be bumpy as we adjust to the new cadence.

Let's not call it a failure if things go bad next week; I fully expect some stabilizing time. I will be assessing things as we go and will not be afraid of reverting our process back if things don't go smoothly.

2. We (Release Engineering, namely Mukunda) will be more diligent and OK

with reverting/holding the train if things start to look bad. We're going to be paying close attention to the fatal monitor in Logstash[0], and if there is a spike post-deploy that we can't identify and fix immediately, we reserve the right to quickly revert and then assign a task to your team to fix. https://logstash.wikimedia.org/#/dashboard/elasticsearch/fatalmonitor

2a. This is a great time to clean up your team's/projects log errors: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/wikimedia-log-errors/

3. We will continue to improve our automated and manual testing

practices. Your help here is appreciated as at the end of the day you're the ones who know your code best.

4. Lastly, I think this exchange between Jon and I really encapsulates

what we're doing here:

<quote name="Jon Robson" date="2015-06-02" time="10:58:13 -0700"> > On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 10:08 AM, Greg Grossmeier <greg@wikimedia.org> wrote: > > I hope people take this change > > as a vote of confidence that needs to be accepted with continued > > maturity of our development and testing practices. > > > > How is your (everyone's) unit test coverage? Probably not great. Improve > > that. > > Yes! > I think this initiative really does make us ask questions about all the > code we're supporting. I acknowledge on the short term we are most likely > going to see more problems then usual, but from my time working in this > community I notice how awesome and effective we are at adapting and > responding to big problems.

Here we go :)

Greg

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