Development process improvement

Engineering processes improvement Increase transparency and effectiveness of Wikimedia Foundation's engineering efforts Start: 2010-06 End: 2014-02 Team members: Rob Lanphier, Guillaume Paumier, Erik Moeller, Alolita Sharma, Tomasz Finc, Ct Woo

Project justification

The growth of the Wikimedia Foundation's engineering programs and the scale of our ambitions necessitates more systematic thinking about all aspects of engineering process and engineering management. This includes:

• Public documentation of projects, status updates, summary reports, and current resource allocation
• Appropriately resourced code review / deployment / release train for both MediaWiki core and extensions
• Effective work methodologies for all Wikimedia engineering teams
• Selection of appropriate process support tools, ideally open source
• Optimized internal and external request tracking and resource allocation

Current priorities

Draft for discussion at 6/14 engineering management meeting

• (Lead: All) Allocate appropriate resources to code review / deployment / release process; develop related resource allocation policy
• (Lead: General Engineering) Continue (based on /Pages organization and related pages) standardization of public reporting / status pages, esp. public resource tracking
• (Lead: Features) Integrate Etherpad notetaking into public wiki pages to ensure visibility of progress
• (Lead: Features/Product) Develop documentation on WMF feature development process
• (Lead: General Engineering) Standardize testing frameworks, increase test coverage, and improve test integration into code review process

Working drafts

• Organization of project pages
• 20% policy

Status updates

From Status updates:

2011-06-14

Alolita, Erik, Rob, Sumana, Ct, Tomasz, Danese had an initial meeting with ThoughtWorks in which we discussed challenges related to the code review/deployment/release management process and engagement of the broader open source community, primarily to help evaluate a possible engagement on continued process improvements; Erik will follow-up.

2011-07-07 and 2011-07-08

"QuickStart" meeting with ThoughtWorks, see wikitech-l announcement. Meeting Notes (DRAFT).

2014

2014-01-22

• notes
• photos (see those that start with "Dev Deploy Process...")

2011-07-07

• Development_process_improvement/7-8_July_2011_Meeting

2015

• Community Engagement (Product)/Collaboration process/Draft
• Design and development principles
• WMF product development process

Previous work

See /Archive