Currently only specialists can jump comfortably from the necessary simplicity of the WMF product development process to the very detailed and specialized documentation at WMF product development process/Proposal. What about creating subpages for every stage? These pages would provide enough information for every stakeholder involved, and especially for our communities and volunteer developers, who don't need to dig deep into WMF's agile methodologies to contribute efficiently to the process.
Topic on Talk:WMF product development process
@Rdicerb (WMF), @WMoran (WMF), any thoughts? Objections?
Following on the feedback from @Salix alba and others, it would be useful to have an additional page focusing on the participation of our communities, explaining the points where they are expected to participate and how, linking to the appropriate pages or sections of the product development process with more details.
For the average editor, the expression "product development process" is confusing enough, leave alone the whole description of the process. We can present a community-centric view of this process highlighting when and how they are expected to get involved, promoting Wikimedia community terminology and trying to minimize software development terminology.
I think it is a great idea. What about a simple FAQ per stage? How do I submit a feature? How do I provide feedback? How can I participate? Would that be better?
OK, one page for every stage.
A FAQ in the stage pages focusing on community members would give the impression that this documentation is only for them. The docs are the same for everybody and need to speak to everybody. I still think that a subpage "WMF product development process/For Communities" might be a better approach.
I have a page that is retooling, and there was a Design Research workshop this morning that took staff through a spreadsheet that describes each teams actions during the stages of development. That could be another way of doing it.
I do think that a goal at the moment is to update the table, but my table/markup skills are lacking. I did upload the chart that was discussed to Commons the other day - not sure if that's helpful (I feel like that clarification may be needed prior.
@Rdicerb (WMF), I think you are right. Let's keep the overview simple, focusing only on the key aspects of the process. Then different audiences may have their own related pages with all the details affecting to them directly. Modular Milestone-driven Development is a good example of a page geared toward Engineering teams more than our communities. We should have a page targeted to our communities. Should this page be created or is there an existing page that could be reused as starting point?
We discussed this problem in a meeting with Wes, Rachel, Keegan, Abbey and Jonathan, and we agreed on the following:
- Each stage will have a subpage (coming soon) with a general intro and sections specific for each audience (i.e. Communities, Performance, Security...)
- Each audience will have a subpage as well, so readers caring mainly about Communities, Performance, Security... have a clear landing page.
- In order to avoid duplicated work and mismatches, we will transclude the sections from the stage subpages into audience subpages, using labelled section transclusion.
Let's see how it goes.