[teampractices] How to document future plans beyond the top goal for each team

[Quim Gil]

On Thu, Apr 9, 2015 at 5:50 PM, Kevin Smith <ksmith at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> I'm curious how you ended up choosing a Task (rather than a Project)
>

ECT's natural rhythm is monthly, and we already create a project for every
month. This quarterly task is basically the only artifact we have aiming to
cover that quarter. Anyway, not a big deal and we'll see how this evolve.


> , and why that task only lists the sub-goals (rather than blocking on
> them).
>

Ah, I like this question. It felt a bit silly having a task with a
description that basically consists of a list of tasks, and then having
such tasks listed again as "Blocked by". A purely cosmetic reason. Again,
we'll see.


That might relate to this documented guideline:
>
> "Creating *new* tracking tasks (tasks that "automatically" get resolved
> when all its dependency tasks are resolved) in Phabricator is discouraged.
> It is recommended to create a project
> <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Phabricator/Creating_and_renaming_projects>
> instead." [1]
>

Mno. This task has a clear end (the end of the quarter), while the usual
tracking tasks that became infamous in Bugzilla times are usually
neverending goals à la "fix teh docs".

I would be interested in hearing the history behind that policy so I can
> understand the rationale.
>
> [1]
> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Phabricator/Project_management/Tracking_tasks
>

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T75703 -- and if you want more, I would
recommend you to sit next to Andre Klapper and a couple of beers.  :)


>
> On Thu, Apr 9, 2015 at 2:07 AM, Quim Gil <qgil at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
>> In the past, the "Wikimedia Engineering/2014-15 Goals" wiki page and
>> the quarterly reviews were the main venues to communicate and discuss
>> future plans.
>>
>> Now quarterly reviews are strictly about the past quarter, and only the
>> top goal of each team is documented in the wiki page. This is probably good
>> enough to have a clear top level view of the critical WMF activities.
>> Still, this leaves out a lot of planning and work.
>>
>> There is also the #Roadmap project in Phabricator, although this is
>> restricted mostly to user/developer facing software changes, which again
>> doesn't reflect all the work teams do.
>>
>> What ECT is doing now is:
>>
>> * document the single top goal in
>> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/2014-15_Goals as
>> instructed
>> * document our other quarterly goals in a Phabricator task blocked by the
>> related epics, i.e. https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T93770
>> * If any epic deserves to be on #Roadmap or #Notice, then we associate
>> these tags accordingly.
>>
>> Is this a good approach?
>>
>> --
>> Quim Gil
>> Engineering Community Manager @ Wikimedia Foundation
>> http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil
>>
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>> teampractices mailing list
>> teampractices at lists.wikimedia.org
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>>
>>
>
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-- 
Quim Gil
Engineering Community Manager @ Wikimedia Foundation
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil
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