Engineering Community Team/Meetings/2013-07-30

July 30th
Today's the monthly retrospective to show off our work to RobLa :-)

Andre

 * puppetizing/debianizing BZ - see July 2nd comment from Faidon on https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/62404/ -- Andre to follow up with Mark Hershberger and with Ops team in August
 * talking about RT & BZ - Andre has sent note to Ken, will follow up in August
 * Ken & RobLa see this as rather a longer-term project, may not be by end of calendar year, because Ops team will have lots of work with ULSFO and other data center work
 * may need earnest reeval of ticket tracking systems; last one was 2010

TODO: Figure out when Andre would do prep work of initial eval of ticket tracking systems Second TODO: Andre to get historical background from Guillaume

What did we do in July & what's next?
Also: Next: Rob: (discussion of hiring pipeline stuff, internships) TODO: schedule next quarterly review for October. Just get them as recurring meetings. 75 minutes. For consideration:
 * OPW/GSoC: all 21 students are on track, thanks to followup from Quim. Reached out to OPW about possible program expansion; will hear back in next few days.
 * QA volunteers: a successful online workshop on Selenium/Cucumber with 13 participants, Vagrant progress, and ongoing pairing. Also Sumana sent http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/qa/2013-July/000263.html to recommend Comments in Local Time & other gadgets people could write tests for.  (Following up on Chris's July 16th post on writing a test for HotCat http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/qa/2013-July/000198.html )
 * Bugzilla: see https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bug_management/status#2013-07-monthly
 * Docs sprint for Tool Labs and clarification of roles and responsibilities, especially around OpenStreetMap
 * VE communications support + blog review and monthly report
 * ECT quarterly review
 * contacts with Mailman & Bugzilla upstream, arranged coworking days in NYC with OpenITP & Kaltura
 * managed social issues with contributors (mailing lists, onwiki, IRC, BZ)
 * recruiting/diversity consultation
 * we spoke at various conferences
 * planning for August & January architecture meetings
 * ESL tutoring
 * Wikimania prep & followup
 * more QA training
 * QA + Release Engineering review
 * OPW/GSoC metamentorship; collecting ideas for January-March round
 * Bugzilla: Puppetize/Debianize it
 * Guillaume mostly off in August with VE communications support; continuing blog entry review
 * Sumana investigating partnerships with more organizations (upstreams, diversity-oriented internship programs) and allying with Ada Initiative in Code of Conduct investigation
 * This all looks good
 * TODO: Next time: Structure it by tying it to quarterly review & roadmap to reduce "wall of stuff" effect :)
 * Goal to get volunteers writing automated tests - lots of activity towards that. Goal of awareness - also activity towards that. Good.
 * Community metrics - see activity statuses. Next step - chat at Wikimania.
 * http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2013-July/127243.html Phoebe:
 * "one thing that was brought up in the Board elections questions & answers was the (ongoing) need to triage feature requests by the community, including especially requests for features from experienced & admin users, and feature requests from the sister projects.
 * One of the ideas in the candidate answers was to focus more on building a central place where feature requests (and cool existing tools) can be shared between language editions and projects, and where feature ideas could get refined outside of bugzilla & the lists; another idea was to build a kind of technical committee to help collect and refine these ideas. Then of course there is the actual technical work of addressing these requests."


 * Well, this is a little like volunteer product management :)
 * There's a pitfall in adding voting
 * TODO: Let's make sure this comes up at least in the quarterly review, or at end of August. Want to coordinate with LCA

Activity statuses to update for this month
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2013/July TODO: send a specific request with Fabrice, ask for them by end of tomorrow.
 * 1) 1.22: we'll have an odd cycle to work around Wikimania for wmf13. Put deployments on hiatus.  May want to change name of that section to release engineering/mgmt (more general).  Also needs to cover awarding of contract for # MediaWiki release management of tarball.
 * 2) Git conversion - also to rename.  We're now done for now. :)  Probably more work to do over next year, with general budget for contractor for dev tools, but pretty much done.  Pywikipedia moved to Git so SVN is read-only.
 * 3) Multimedia: Fabrice to provide update, Platform to update
 * 4) Admin tools - hiatus
 * 5) Auth systems - should be an OAuth deployment to beta this week, testwikis after Hong Kong
 * 6) HipHop deployment - mainly on hold, some minor work on VMs.
 * 7) Security -- no security releases in July
 * 8) Beta cluster: has some ownership... Antoine will be doing this status.

Conferences, dates
Wikimania coming up Aug 7-11 Rachel- vacation Aug 5-9 Other conference deadlines:
 * Guillaume: possibly a couple days off in August/September; will provide tentative dates as soon as they're known
 * Andre:
 * July Wed31-August Mon05: GNOME GUADEC (Brno/CZ)
 * August Wed07-August Mon12: Wikimania (Hongkong/PRC)
 * October Fri04-Sun06: Mozilla Summit 2013
 * Sumana
 * Quim in Germany until Wikimania, except
 * Quim finishing holidays tomorrow July 31. Then flying to Hong Kong on Aug 2.
 * Željko:
 * vacation late July - early August
 * August 16, eurucamp/JRubyConf EU Workshop, Berlin, Germany
 * September 6-7, BalCCon, Novi Sad, Serbia
 * September 27-28, CITCON, Turin, Italy
 * November 7, SQA Days, Lviv, Ukraine
 * Chris:
 * Aug 4-10 Agile2013 - "radically open software testing"
 * Aug 23 PTO
 * possible days off in October
 * FOSDEM - with Siebrand, Quim is chasing FOSDEM people :) - as soon as there is a call for devrooms/booths Quim will start discussion