[teampractices] Towards more holistic product/feature development

[Chris McMahon]

> On Sun, Sep 22, 2013 at 9:28 PM, Diederik van Liere <
dvanliere at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Some recent discussions on different internal mailing lists seem to
indicate to me that we need to think about a more holistic approach to our
product development. In my mind, the following discussion threads point all
in the same direction:
> 1) Faidon -- Site issues, past two weeks & in progress (Ops list)
> 2) Erik -- Scrum of Scrums (Team practises list)
> 3) Tomasz - The Rule of Three (Team practises list)

> On Mon, Sep 23, 2013 at 12:21 AM, Siebrand Mazeland (WMF) <
smazeland at wikimedia.org> wrote
> I think a lot of what you describe can be covered by a Definition of
Done[1]: "Definition of Done is a simple list of activities...

> On Mon, Sep 23, 2013 at 9:50 AM, Chris Steipp <csteipp at wikimedia.org>
 wrote:
> Thanks for bringing this up Diederik. It's become a popular trend in
secure development to define security requirements as non-functional
requirements, so working to get those into the standard wmf scrum process
would be helpful.

I don't think that there is a "standard wmf scrum process".

The term "scrum of scrums" comes from the need of Enterprise organizations
to scale agile practices for very large dev teams broken into smaller Scrum
teams.  Typically agile adoption in Enterprise is mandated by upper
management, so Scrum teams in the Enterprise will typically share a set of
project management tools and a common development process and a common
vocabulary, such that all the individual Scrum teams have a common
understanding and implementation of concepts like "estimation", "velocity",
"iteration", "user story", and even "done", "deployed", etc..

That's not true at WMF, where development practices have grown up
organically.  To my knowledge the project management tools in use by WMF
dev teams today are Mingle, Trello, Bugzilla, and wiki/GDoc, and each team
uses each tool in very different ways and all have different development
processes.  Definitions of terms like "story" and "done" vary, as do ideas
like "estimation" and "velocity", where they exist.  Not everyone has had
the ThoughtWorks QuickStart training, nor has everyone had the Mountain
Goat Product Owner training, nor does everyone have previous experience
doing successful agile software development.

A number of people have pointed out that we have concerns that cut across
all feature development:  design, security,
localization/internationalization, performance, analytics, QA are all
cross-cutting concerns, and there seems to be some impedance mismatch
distributing these cross-cutting concerns among the ongoing development
projects.

I would like to see these cross-cutting concerns acknowledged and
implemented in reasonable ways, but I think we might be facing some
preliminary work to define shared development practice and concepts before
a scrum-of-scrums sort of arrangement would be effective.
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