Wikimedia Release Engineering Team/Phab process proposal

Purpose of this document

The WMF Release Engineering team does not have a single/unified process for how we manage tasks across/within projects in Phabricator. The current situation was a combination of organic growth and best efforts/ideas. It is also not documented (because it's practically undocumentable)

This document attempts to do two things:

1. Propose a unified process/description, and
2. document it on wiki.

Current situation

We have a team project at #Release-Engineering-Team (aka: #releng)

We have a ton of software projects we maintain (#beta-cluster, #deploy-tooling, #browser-tests, etc, etc etc)

A task can be in any of:

• Just #releng
• Just some software project (eg: #beta-cluster)
• Both in #releng and a software project

There is no consistency and status of a task, for example, a task can be in the "in-progress" column on one or more workboard.

Problems

• Other teams don't know if we're working on something or if we plan on working on it any time soon.
• It's hard to see what the entire team is working on (or at least, what people are saying they are working on based on assignee status).
• It's hard to see what the team is blocked on in one place.
• We're tracking status (eg: "in-progress") on multiple workboards.
• It's hard to plan the future without mudding up workboards that track shorter term work.

Proposal

Generally, be more "people focused" than "software focused".

The projects

Planning related

• #releng-epics: to track all open tasks that are on our long term goal list (aka: epics).
  • These generally take more than one quarter, but don't have to.
  • Examples:
    • [EPIC] Run CI jobs in disposable VMs
    • "Migrate Gerrit to Differential"
• Quarterly projects eg: #releng-201516-Q1: to track quarterly keyresults/outcomes/measures of success
  • These are explicitly not tasks you "work on". They are the desired outcome from the tasks/work that you do work on.
  • Examples:
    • [keyresult] subset of jobs run in disposable instances
    • [keyresult] Allow cloning of Phabricator hosted git repositories

Daily task tracking

• #releng: Our team board to track work progress/status, eg, the board where the "in-progress" column lives
  • Use this board only for work tasks
  • Examples:
    • "Scap3 should break up remote deploy tasks"
    • "Phabricator needs to expose ssh"

Software projects

• These are the usual software projects, eg #beta-cluster, #deployment-systems, or #MediaWiki-Vagrant
• All tasks should have one of these associated with it. Think of it as the primary home of the task.
  • If one doesn't exist then it should probably be created (is Greg's guess); there are of course corner cases.
• Do not use those boards to track daily work in progress. In other words, remove the "in-progress" column from these projects (unless otherwise needed) and only worry about dragging a task into an "in-progress" column on the #releng workboard.
  • That information ("in-progress") is still visible to users/others interested. See the next section for further explanation.

The process

• Add any task you plan to work "soon" on to the #releng team project
  • Corollary: remove the #releng project to tasks we don't plan to work on any time "soon"
  • "soon" here is not precisely defined, and that's OK. Let's just not have tasks rotting in #releng that haven't been touched for months
• Drag the task into the "in-progress" column on the #releng team workboard when you start working on it
  • Take task T97464 as an example.
  • Right now the users/others interested in the work see that it is in the "backlog" column of our team project: see this screenshot.
  • When someone begins work on this, they will drag it into the "in-progress" column, which will do two things:
    • 1) it will email all subscribers that someone moved it in the team "in-progress" column
    • 2) Be clear at the topic of the task for new people that it is in the "in-progress" column because of the "(in-progress)" next to the RelEng team project.

What this gives us

• One place to look for who from RelEng is working on what right now (the #releng team project "in-progress" column)
• Clear areas for planning tasks (#releng-epics and the #releng-201516-Q2 etc projects)
• Corollary to above: No longer cluttering up our #releng team workboard with planning tasks

Workboard Tips

NB: expand as needed

• Sometimes a "watching/externally blocked/stalled" column is useful
• Having the default column be something like "To Triage" and then a "Triaged" column tends to be useful.