[teampractices] Experimenting with Pivotal Tracker

[Erik Moeller]

On Wed, Nov 13, 2013 at 10:34 PM, Steven Walling <swalling at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Does this mean we get to hire an internal tools team someday? :)

Absolutely, we will get to hire an internal tools team someday.
Someday is a nicely relative agile time estimate - maybe I'll give you
a burndown chart to go along with it. ;-)

In seriousness, I think the tooling problem is very tricky, and a
"tools team" isn't necessarily the answer. My worry would be that they
immediately take on a very large problem (like creating our own agile
PM tool), which then becomes their only development/maintenance
responsibility.

Distributing the load among other orgs that have the same problem
would be ideal. At the same time, the development of tools with a
beautiful user experience and a clear product vision tends to benefit
from a significant degree of integrated resourcing and leadership. For
a very ambitious project like a solid alternative to
Mingle/Trello/Pivotal/..., this might be a case where a joint
investment by e.g. Wikimedia+Mozilla in a third party org could be a
better way to bootstrap something than in-house development.

For less ambitious projects (like experimenting with existing
Bugzilla-based solutions), the combination of more engineering
staffing overall + careful choices where we prioritize effort will
hopefully enable us to make steady progress.

Erik
-- 
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation