Dear Wikimedians,
We are changing our engineering processes to improve how we engage with you -- our valued
contributors and editors -- around software development.
We are beginning with the collaborative buildout and deployment of VisualEditor. We are
moving community engagement processes and product decisions into earlier stages of
development, and making them iterative. In a perfect world this process would start prior
to feature development, but in this case VisualEditor is already in-flight, so your
participation now is critical. With your participation, we can work together to ensure
this new process works.
In this new process, we commit to:
• Collectively identify success criteria for each target audience, from new editors
(simple feature set) to expert editors (complex feature set).
• Ensure success criteria represents the quantified and qualified goals. The feature will
only be shipped when the success criteria is met.
• Enable the feature for only portions of specific audiences that would best benefit (a
process known as “incremental roll-out”) at a time.
• Triage and prioritize all bugs and feature requests on a weekly basis to ensure they are
addressed in a timely fashion. Publicly post responses, assessment, and target
implementations. This will replace the RFP process and ensure we are tracking on all
requested features efficiently.
How you can engage:
• Report bugs or enhancement requests in Phabricator:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/visualeditor/
• Join any of the weekly triage meetings to nominate a release blocker. Please see the
instructions at:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:VisualEditor/Portal
• Participate in development. You can find the team on IRC in the #mediawiki-visualeditor
channel on
irc.freenode.net.
We are excited to get this long-standing feature to the level of quality and success we
all want and need. It is a collective effort. You are not only a stakeholder, but an
active contributor in this work. We want to all to be proud of the outcome. Please
participate now.
All my best,
Damon
—
Damon Sicore
VP of Engineering
Wikimedia Foundation
dsicore(a)wikimedia.org