On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 4:50 PM, Brion Vibber <br...@pobox.com> wrote: > This is one of the reasons I tend to advocate shorter > development/review/deployment cycles. By keeping the cycle short, we can > help build up regular habits: run through some reviews every couple days. Do > a deployment update *every* week. If you don't think your code will be > working within that time, either work on it outside of trunk or break it up > into pieces that won't interfere with other code. > > With a long cycle, review gets pushed aside until it's no longer habit, and > gets lost.
Right. And just to weigh in quickly on the resources issue -- the review/deploy/release train is clearly not moving at the pace we want. This does affect WMF staffers and contractors as well, but we know that it's especially frustrating for volunteers and third party committers. We kicked around the idea of a "20% rule" for all funded engineers (IMO not just senior staff) in Berlin and in the office yesterday, and I think Roan mentioned it earlier in this thread: i.e. ensuring that every WMF-funded engineer spends one day a week on "service" work (code review, design/UX review, deployment, shell bugs, software bugs, bug triaging, etc.). An alternative model is to have rotating teams that do this work. I personally prefer the 20% model because it gives more consistency/predictability and less churn, but I'm curious what other folks think, and I'm comfortable with us continuing this discussion openly on this list. Whether that would get us to a healthier balance remains to be seen, but I think there's pretty broad agreement that adding more support to the review/deployment/release process is a necessary precondition for any other process changes like moving towards pre-commit review. Clearly what's been said in this thread is true -- there are lots of things that can be done to reduce our technical debt and make it easier to accommodate and manage new changes, but without added dedicated capacity, the train won't move at a speed that we're happy with. We can't change that overnight (because we need to figure out the right rhythm and the right processes together), but we will change it. Erik -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
