Forgot to reply all. Matt Flaschen
On 03/03/2014 11:00 PM, Whatamidoing (WMF)/Sherry Snyder 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." Among a certain (vocal) subset of the community, this proposal will be understood as "spend lots of money to continue screwing up, instead of hiring someone to fix the bugs before we users ever see them".
The full saying is, "Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers." (http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s04.html). 'Customer' isn't exactly the right word here, but the 'listen' is still critical.
If we just develop things in isolation, then release to production rarely, two things will happen:
1. Users will not be able to provide feedback until we've gone too far down the wrong path. By releasing early and often, we get prompt feedback and can steer more quickly.
2. Sometimes, more bugs will pile up at those release points (since they did not appear/were not noticed in earlier testing, or *could not* appear in low-load or non-production environments)
We are working to provide more of a ramp for features (e.g. with feature flags and Beta Features), but I don't think we should move to a slow release cycle.
Matt Flaschen _______________________________________________ teampractices mailing list teampractices@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/teampractices
