Core Platform Team

This team has the primary responsibility for the Core Platform that supports the projects of the Wikimedia Movement. The platform is comprised of MediaWiki and the Wikimedia service infrastructure which provides our services, APIs and tools. Additionally, the team supports MediaWiki as a FLOSS product to be used by 3rd parties to host and share knowledge in a variety of contexts. This team was formed in July 2018 by merging the MediaWiki Platform team and the Services team.

Goals

 * To lead the maintenance and improvement of the MediaWiki platform.
 * To assist and encourage feature development on top of MediaWiki by providing developers with a clean and elegant core.
 * To provide value for end users by undertaking feature development work which is primarily architectural in nature.
 * To create and publish a MediaWiki roadmap to assist planning of internal and external users.
 * To establish guidelines and standards for the MediaWiki core code.
 * To automate monitoring, metric reporting and logging or Wikimedia services.
 * To keep the majority of services simple and stateless by offering general multi-datacenter storage and change propagation solutions.
 * To make our infrastructure more flexible, robust and efficient by gradually migrating from a monolithic architecture to micro-services.

Programs
The Core Platform Team is currently supporting the following programs:
 * TEC1: Reliability, Performance, and Maintenance
 * TEC2: Modern Event Platform
 * TEC13: Code Health
 * CDP2: Platform Evolution (see also: Platform Evolution)
 * CDP4: Structured Data Program

CPT Work Processes
Our pipeline

CPT Initiatives
The Core Platform Team work process involves a number of stages that derive from the CPT Roadmap, which maps at a high level the layout of all initiatives that the CPT is responsible to complete or support. Initiatives are drawn from the CPT Roadmap and entered into CPT Initiative Planning. The Director, Program Manager, Product Managers, Engineering Managers and Technical Leads are responsible for the work of developing the initial outline to a full proposal decomposed into Epics and Tasks ready to be scheduled and implement by Engineers.

All CPT Initiatives are published and updated through out planning and implementation on our wiki.

The CPT is composed of 2 functional teams specialising in Distributed System and Storage, and Features, Data and Content. Within CPT we break down into 3 core teams, 2 teams focused on product work and 1 Clinic Duty Team. Our work process is agile based using 2 week sprints. The content of the sprints is determined in pre-sprint planning. Product teams are formed based on the functional requirements of the projects to be undertaken while the Clinic Duty team is rotated on a sprint by sprint basis.

Supporting WMF Teams
For work that is inbound to the CPT from WMF teams or external volunteers, our goal is to participate early in projects where we are a dependency or have a supporting role in order to ensure that we can integrate this work into our ongoing planning and provide others with consistent, predictable timelines for when work can be accomplished.

For Unbreak Now, reactive work and external code reviews, the Clinic Duty Team is designed to provide ongoing triaging and handling of inbound tasks as well as working on code health, maintenance and improvements.

Tasks that are Unbreak Now(UBN) or reactive should be tagged with #core-platform-team, they will then be picked up by our triage process and scheduled

Inbound work is managed by our Task Triage process, which evaluates the task and routes it appropriately depending priority and content.

Individual Goals
Members of our team set goals each quarter in order to support other team members and their own professional development.

Goals

Workboards

 * #core-platform-team
 * This board contains our Inbox and a set of columns identifying the Initiatives we are working on and the prioritised tasks of work to complete each
 * #cpt-workboards
 * This board contains the CPT Icebox and each of our sub team work boards
 * #cpt-contract, our contractor workboard
 * #cpt-clinic, our Clinic Duty Team workboard
 * #cpt-green, Product Team
 * #cpt-purple, Product Team

Contact the team
Contact the team:
 * wikitech-l mailing list
 * #wikimedia-services IRC channel
 * #mediawiki-core IRC channel