MediaWiki Engineering Group/mwe intake process

Overview

We have a group level triage meeting that enables representatives from all teams within the MediaWiki Engineering Group (Content Transform, MediaWiki Interfaces and MediaWiki Platform) to meet, review, prioritize and route incoming requests to the appropriate team.

This weekly meeting is held every Wednesday and is lead by MediaWiki product management. The board used for this process is the MediaWiki Engineering Group workboard.

Phabricator tickets that are tagged with #mediawiki-engineering will automatically go to the inbox column of this board for prioritization and routing.

Intake Process

• Log a ticket in Phabricator and tag the ticket with #mediawiki-engineering
• MediaWiki Engineering Group meets weekly on Wednesdays to review, prioritize and if appropriate route tickets to a specific team. You will see a comment/action on your ticket that it has been assigned to a team or another action is required as part of the outcome from the prioritization meeting once it has been triaged.
• Next, if your ticket was routed to a team, it will become part of the weekly planning/prioritization meetings that each team runs. These team level planning meetings usually happen on Mondays. You will see another follow-up action/comment on your ticket by someone from the corresponding team it has been routed too as a result of this step.
• Next, once prioritization, and planning at the team level has occurred, work on your ticket will begin!

Frequently Asked Questions

If a ticket is tagged with #mediawiki-engineering and then it gets into this process, does that mean it will get work done on it by a team in the MediaWiki Engineering Group?

• Maybe. Just because it’s tagged on our board doesn’t mean MediaWiki Engineering teams are automatically obligated to work on it. MediaWiki Engineering is only obligated to review the ticket and respond to it as part of this triage process. We evaluate a number of different factors while prioritizing work including impact to annual plan/committed work in progress, severity/impact of the issue should it be a bug and also if the ticket falls within our sphere of ownership or experience.

Who attends these meetings every week?

• A product manager from the MediaWiki Product Management team attends in addition to one or more members from each subteam within the MediaWiki Engineering Group. We have a weekly rotation sheet that team members review and sign themselves up on as part of sharing responsibilities for ensuring this meeting is will attended and that the triage decisions can be made effectively.