Wikimedia Product Infrastructure team/Push Notifications Infrastructure/Dependencies Questionnaire


After going through this checklist, if you answer "yes" to any question, fill in a row on the dependencies tab (Q2 FY19-20 archive here) in Airtable.

If you are creating a new extension/service or a major modification of an existing extension, please ensure a discussion is initiated with:

  • SRE
  • Security
  • Performance
  • RelEng

See the following sections for links to some of the intake processes for these teams as well as for others.


Extra storage or database changes edit

  • Does your innovation dramatically increase the number of rows in the page or revision tables? NO
  • Will you be persisting a large number of new objects in Swift? NO
  • Will you be doubling or trebling the number of objects stored in our CDN (Varnish)? NO
  • Will you need to store/cache data with any interface other than the standard interfaces offered by MediaWiki? (This includes using restbase for caching results, which is now deprecated) NO

Security Review edit

  • Are you doing anything with authentication authorization or use of personal info? NO
  • Could what you are releasing affect logins or sessions on Wikipedia? NO
  • Are you creating a new extension or renaming one? YES
  • Are you creating a new service component? YES
  • Will you be integrating new third party libraries or externally hosted services? YES
  • For more on how to request a security review and to set expectations on turn-around times

Production readiness edit

  • Are you going to be hosting a type of technology other than MediaWiki or stateless Node.js? NO (tenatively)
  • Do you need to stand up a non-production environment on bare metal servers? NO
  • Do you need a temporary staging ground to move or re-image servers? NO
  • Are you adding a new extension into production? YES
  • Do you need additional computing power? NO

Performance edit

  • Will you be increasing the number of web requests dramatically in your project or adding significant JavaScript/CSS for most page loads? NO
  • Are you introducing
    • a new extension YES
    • new backend service YES

Technical Committee edit

If you are making changes that are strategic, cross-cutting, or hard to undo, use TechCom's RFC process to ensure all relevant stakeholders can provide feedback. Ask yourself:

  • Is the proposed change hard to undo? Examples include defining public APIs, introducing new Wikitext syntax, introducing large database tables, etc. NO
  • Is the proposed change cross-cutting? That is, will it have a significant effect on other teams, now or in the future? YES
  • Is the proposed change strategic? That is, does it have significant impact on what kind of services we offer, what technology we rely on, or who can use the software and services we offer? NO

When in doubt, get in touch with TechCom. If they see no need for an RFC, the process can be bypassed.

Research edit

  • Do you need to measure the impact of what you have developed? YES
    • In the majority of the cases, you can answer this with the expertise in Audiences; sometimes you may need some Research consulting.
  • Are you going to implement a change that is the output of a machine learning model? NO
    • Talking with Research can help with identifying the potential biases in such models and mitigating them (or at least be aware of them).

FR Tech edit

  • Are you making any UI changes that might affect CentralNotice and presentation of banners? NO
  • Are you planning to ship or test at scale (public a/b test, for example) a UX change on English in December? NO
  • Are any features likely to directly impact pageviews on large wikis? NO
  • Are you planning to deploy to a wiki with an active fundraiser? NO

Legal edit

  • Will your data collection be growing significantly? NO
  • Are you running a third party hosted survey? NO
  • Do you plan to start requesting new types of demographic indicators? NO
  • Will you be integrating new third party libraries or externally hosted services? YES
  • Do you require translation of the Privacy Policy or Data Retention Guidelines into a language not yet translated? NO
  • Will you be buying any new SaaS offerings for your efforts? NO (tentatively)

Data edit

  • Will your data collection be growing significantly? NO
  • Do you need access to analytics infrastructure? NO