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Technical Debt SIG/minutes/20170921

< Technical Debt SIG
Attendence - 10 BlueJeans
Attendees -

Agenda

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  • Technical Debt
  • Overview of Tech Debt Program
  • What to expect moving forward
  • Q&A

Please excuse the paraphrasing, I'm going from memory and forgot to capture the chat window contents. Please modify/augment where needed.

    • JR - What are some of the biggest challenges that you see with addressing tech debt?
    • David - With large code bases like Core, where there might only be 1 or 2 people working on it, how to we get potentially large amounts of work done. How do you see some of the other groups you mentioned helping with that.
    • JR - It's not clear yet how we'll tackle those kinds of challenges. However, one of the quarterly objectives for the TD Program is to look into orphaned code. There are many components today that don't have an official owner. We'll need to look at those and determine if they should continue to be supported or sunsetted. Greg G is leading up the sunsetting working group to help us make those decisions. If a currently orphaned component won't be sunsetted, then we need to work towards getting the proper funding to get the level of support needed/desired. Tim, do you have any thoughts on that as it relates to core?
    • Tim - We have a team of 4 developers today and are making good progress on things that are likely considered tech debt, but 200,000 lines of code is a lot for 4 people.
    • Cormac - Addressing technical debt will depend on a solid definition and understanding of what good code looks like. At my previous job, we were only 30 developers or so, and it was challenging to get alignment on that solid definition. WMF is considerably larger, how do we go about doing that here?
    • JR - As I am fairly new myself. I'm still figuring that out myself. My hope is that we will involved as many developers in the process of that definition. I believe that once we get to a proposal we can create a RFC (request for comment) as a more formal process.
    • JR - Although the traditional focus of Technical Debt has been code, it's important to note that TD reaches out beyond the code for us. Technical debt in operations is a challenge as well and includes things like OS upgrades, patches, and other items that overtime erode our ability to maintain/support the environment. There are also other areas of debt such as UX debt that need to be addressed as well.


Notes

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Jean-Rene Branaa's slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1jozAdikLyU31RQFb9i_fFOt7kpjoBZmhnzZuE1o2MZU/edit#slide=id.p See https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/TechDebtSIG-20170920 for notes on the slides

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