[Wikitech-l] A balanced approach to 20% time

Hi everyone, I'm forking off from the "Development process doesn't work" thread to highlight a message that Sumana sent the other day. Last year, Erik asked me to manage the 20% policy time that has frequently been referenced here. Prior to the Git migration, I've made a point of emphasizing code review, because we had a pretty large backlog, and the consequences of falling behind there were more severe than letting other things slide. The goal of the 20% policy has always been to have a bounded but appropriately large time set aside for supporting volunteer development and high priority bugfixing. Now that we're on Git, and more specifically, now that we're doing pre-commit review, there are a number of activities that we can afford to bump up the priority on. They include: * Reviewing extensions for deployment * Deploying extensions * Patches in Bugzilla * Bugfixing problems outside of developers' focus areas * Shell requests * (possibly in the glorious future) pull requests issued in mirrors (e.g. Github, Gitorious, etc) That's a simplified version. A more complete view is here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_20%25_policy#Scope I've handed the baton off to Sumana to manage 20% time on behalf of the community, a point that was included in her message below, but may have been missed. We need to look at the totality of volunteer development activity, plus take a look at high priority bug fixing on behalf of the reader and editor community, and coordinate our approach in addressing those issues. That's what I've asked Sumana to do, which is reflected in her message below. If you haven't already read this, please do. Thanks Rob ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Sumana Harihareswara <sumanah(a)wikimedia.org> Date: Tue, Apr 10, 2012 at 5:02 AM Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Development process doesn't work (yes this is another complaint from another community member) To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> On 04/04/2012 09:14 AM, Sumana Harihareswara wrote: I can't tell whether anyone read my message on the 4th. I know it was long, but that's because I was addressing pretty much all the open questions at the time. :-) If you have concerns about this issue, please do read it. Petr replied to me offlist to straighten out his particular situation. It sounds like for one of his extensions the ball is in his court, and for the other (OnlineStatusBar), it's in the WMF's. I've updated three pages to clarify and document our process: * https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Writing_an_extension_for_deployment now explains that I'm the point of contact to get extensions authors their initial technical design reviews, Howie Fung is their contact to get initial user experience design reviews, and the release manager is their contact to get reviewed code deployed. * https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Review_queue now has the status of each extension; about 8 are waiting for more WMF work, and 9 are waiting for responses from extension authors. * https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Deployment_queue So I need to get some user experience reviews and some technical/code reviews going for the 8 extensions that are awaiting more WMF work. Tim suggested that it might be more efficient and pleasant if WMF engineers could concentrate on one project each for their 20% community service time, and RobLa has now decided that I should be the one prioritizing and allocating 20%-time responsibilities. So I'm going to be asking some WMF engineers if they could switch from doing patch review (in Gerrit) to reviewing particular extensions, for their 20% days. I have a few people in mind. Another snag, in at least one case, was that WMF engineers are unclear on who qualifies for deployment privileges and how to get them. That's something we started talking about in December in http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2011-December/thread.html#5… and that still needs followup - I believe Ian is going to put some preliminary notes on mediawiki.org soon, and Platform Engineering (specifically RobLa & I) will follow up on that. Hope this helps. -- Sumana Harihareswara Volunteer Development Coordinator Wikimedia Foundation _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l