[teampractices] [Engineering] Feedback requested on proposal for creation of Agile Specialist Group

[Erik Moeller]

On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 7:52 PM, Whatamidoing (WMF)/Sherry Snyder
<ssnyder at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> "Don't poke me at all", for most of them, means "do not ever release
> software that contains bugs that they will personally experience".  For
> another subset, it means never making any UI changes.  It's a thoroughtly
> unrealistic position, but those are their real opinions.
>
> If you want to reduce "misunderstandings" by this segment of the userbase,
> then you might consider re-writing your very public proposal to identify any
> potental benefits to end users, e.g., by increasing the thoroughness of QA
> work by relieving some people of non-technical duties.

Sherry, I think the suggestion to add a "Benefits to end users"
section to the proposal is an excellent one.

Matt is absolutely correct that this isn't about "pushing out more
things faster", it's about creating higher quality software - it
simply turns out that _one_ of the ways to do that is to shorten the
elapsed time between a programmer writing code and an end user
executing said code, and to create the preconditions (automated
testing, etc.) to make that possible.

But Arthur's proposal boils down to this: Let's find ways to help all
our teams continuously improve how we deliver value to our users. A
program like BetaFeatures can actually slow things down in terms of
the speed at which a feature is delivered to _all_ users, but increase
the overall value that is delivered to users. The mobile team, which
Arthur is ScrumMaster on, had an alpha->beta release cycle for mobile
features well before the BetaFeatures framework for the desktop
existed -- so the idea of careful, staged rollouts is in no way
inconsistent with a well-run team. In fact, it often depends on it.

It's important to correct caricatures that a watchword like Agile will
evoke, and I agree with Ori that "Agile" isn't the only game in town
and also under-represents the importance of open source developer
engagement, transparency, and other aspects of how WMF teams operate.
We have a team practices mailing list, so why not a Team Practices
Group at WMF? That to me also paints a larger vision of the potential
future of that group than simply the House of ScrumMasters, while
still beginning with a modest investment focused on well-understood
pain points to demonstrate the value to the org.

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