On Mon, Mar 3, 2014 at 8:00 PM, Whatamidoing (WMF)/Sherry Snyder <[email protected]> wrote:
> (2) Did you all know that a significant proportion of our user community is > unhappy with the way that Agile affects them? "Release early, release > often" from the user's perspective means "have horribly and/or newly busted > stuff screw up your work twice a week." :-) I think there's two responses to that: 1) Use of programs like BetaFeatures. I don't think anyone's complained that we're pushing out updates to multimedia viewer pretty continuously while it's in Beta, for example. For a feature that's still new and under heavy development, this helps us get feedback from early adopters and testers that influences the shape of the product without being disruptive to the entire site. It's neither a novel nor revolutionary idea, but it works pretty well. We need to expand that toolkit as appropriate (e.g. release to % of audience, more split tests, more calls-to-action, etc.). 2) We do have a higher tolerance for breaking things than, say, a banking website. We do very complex, challenging and ambitious things, and in order to learn what works and what doesn't, we have to try & learn quickly in a real-world setting. That _will_ disrupt some users' workflows some of the time, and that's the price we pay for doing what we need to do - there's really no alternative other than "make fewer changes" (which, say, banking websites typically do). Making bigger changes and waiting longer to release just leads to massive pain delivered in longer intervals as opposed to smaller pain delivered continuously. :) We've seen this in the past when we had 6 month+ release cycles. Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation _______________________________________________ teampractices mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/teampractices
