Hey all,
As people probably(?) know, the WMF has replaced Bugzilla with Phabricator (
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/) . This is also taking over from a host
of other services, including RT. Analytics Engineering has already switched
over, as have a lot of teams, but R&D has not - instead, we use Trello (
https://trello.com/b/k5N0ivoM/research-and-data). I think that if we're
going to switch over, we should probably do it reasonably soon (the longer
we wait, the more things we have to port). This thread is to have the
switch-or-not conversation in. I'll start ;p.
I'd like to strongly advocate that we switch to phabricator, for several
reasons. Even were Phabricator less-good than Trello, there's an inherent
advantage in consolidating systems. It means fewer logins to maintain, and
a less-distributed workset. By extension, it means a reduced barrier for
interacting with other teams, or volunteers, and vice versa.
But actually, Phab isn't worse than Trello: it's better. For one thing,
it's better at letting us work with other teams.
We're dependent on Analytics Engineering (on Phabricator), and work with
the VE team (on Phabricator), Fundraising (on Mingle), Mobile (also on
Trello)....the list goes on and on. The trello model, in which everything
is split out into different boards you may or may not have access to,
combined with the distribution of teams across platforms, makes it a
constant pain to bring people into conversations and work on problems that
are both our problem + AnEng's problem, or our problem + customer's
problem. People need to cross the streams or juggle multiple logins.
With Phabricator, it's a lot easier to see what everyone is doing, keep
abreast of the general gestalt in movement/WMF work, and chip in on tasks
that don't officially belong to your team. And because a lot of teams use
it, the responsiveness from customers when we ask questions is a lot better.
Phab also seems to, at least for me, naturally fit my work process better.
I think of a research project ("find out how long mobile sessions are") as
actually being a series of individual tasks - "find out what a session is",
"work out how to measure it", "measure it". Trello doesn't really
have
support for that kind of heirarchical, dependent, chunked work. It has
checklists but they don't allow for any actual data segmentation or detail.
Alternately you can write multiple cards and link them together, but this
is entirely ad-hoc; there's no structure to it, it's not obvious without
reading each card what the relationship is, and you have to do the heavy
lifting yourself.
Phabricator is designed for precisely this model, because that's how
engineering work tends to break down. It's built-in, fully supported, and
extracting the tree is easy.
So those are the reasons I have, off the top of my head. Other reasons?
Counter-arguments? Post em here.
--
Oliver Keyes
Research Analyst
Wikimedia Foundation