Hi all,
Please note that what I'm about to talk about is informative to how the Wikimedia Foundation develops MediaWiki software.
As you may have seen, engineering in the Wikimedia Foundation is working to define the software product development process to be used internally [0]. As part of this, I'm working on developing a list of guiding principles for the software development process [1]. For examples of what this looks like for some other organizations, please see [2] and/or [3].
There is an initial draft of principles up that resulted from the above, located on MediaWiki.org [4]. These are high-level principles that are meant to be overarching reminders of good practice for WMF engineering, a sort-of poster on the wall. Vagrity is intentional to an extent as a result. As noted on the wiki page, this list is being developed in spirit with Wikimedia movement [5] principles, the Wikimedia Foundation's Guiding Principles for operation [6, and a survey of some staff to find out what is important to them in the process [7].
Comments, questions, thoughts, and whatnot are welcome on the talk page [8].
0. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WMF_product_development_process 1. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Design_and_development_principles 2. http://www.unicefstories.org/principles 3. https://www.gov.uk/design-principles 4. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Design_and_development_principles/Draft 5. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_movement 6. https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Wikimedia_Foundation_Guiding... 7. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Design_and_development_principles/Survey <~ still to be filled in 8. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Design_and_development_principles/Draft