User:Sharihareswara (WMF)/archivedectmeetings Jan2013

January 3 2013
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Platform_Engineering QA: ECT: Reminder to have monthly statuses for the monthly report this week!
 * Goal: January 4th, have all the browser automation docs refactored
 * This is on track but is also ongoing :-)
 * On Monday - have someone from target audience playtest the docs
 * MobileFrontend on beta - Michelle is leading that
 * "First substantive systematic outreach to potential testers (possibly via CentralNotice banners)"
 * Echo is now deployed to mediawiki.org and has a basic testplan. Having more eyeballs will be useful.  Quim & Chris discussed. Quim to check in with Fabrice & Kaldari today
 * RobLa: we need very good general-purpose coverage for the data center migration Jan 22
 * There are 3 or 4 useful browser tests in the QA backlog -- features known to be fragile
 * Chris created a NPP test & found it's broken in IE7 & IE6
 * Chris to move the checklist from an etherpad to a wiki today
 * Andre's blog post: http://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper/2013/01/01/wikimedias-bug-management/
 * Bug days will be monthly
 * Bug day may be connected to some other testing
 * For bug triage: look statistically at components that look like a mess or people who have a lot of tickets assigned to them (e.g. Chris Steipp?)
 * Look at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Qa/test_backlog#Backlog to help QA add backlog items for problems that manifest in the UI
 * Andre to look at his table of who runs what components & possibly share/publish
 * Guillaume Paumier: "As a quick note, I'd love to get some feedback on https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/Ambassadors ; I'm going to discuss it with a few other people as well, but people in this group probably have comments and opinions on it."
 * He's tried to shorten it - please read it in its entirety.
 * Anything confusing? a good idea?
 * RobLa & Sumana: look on ambassadors talkpage re difference between product manager & ambassador
 * RobLa believes the ambassadors page should at least allude to PMs -- at least link to a place that exists (maybe link to the blog post) agreed, Guillaume will add it as well as the How to contribute link suggested by Quim

Misc notes
Chris will submit a talk to an Agile testing conference

Jan 8 2013
Quim looks forward to your feedback ref Thanks! http://wikitech.wikimedia.org/view/Eqiad_Migration_Planning QA this week: extending automated test coverage (espec re EQIAD migration) & focusing on building community -- test exercise for Echo. Echo IRC meeting today. Test exercise planned for Jan 30th. Later today, Quim & Chris to decide goals for that exercise. MobileFrontend in beta labs - scheduled for spike on the 14th -- 1 or 2 sprints
 * Syncing "News" block with our social media? (in mediawiki.org homepage) http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:MediaWiki#Syncing_.22News.22_block_with_our_social_media.3F_21999
 * [Wikitech-l] How to contribute to sysadmin / devops http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2013-January/065514.html
 * Goal - EOD tomorrow - clearer howto on writing acceptance criteria

Jan 17 2013
Andre did https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bug_management/Development_teams_usage -- check it out! Quim waiting for response re wheel thread on wikitech-l

QA
QA last week: extending automated test coverage (espec re EQIAD migration) continues Building community -- test exercise for Echo canceled MobileFrontend in beta labs - spike on the 14th successful, Max/Antoine/Arthur proceeding Current policy: code deployed to beta has to have been merged to the master branch. This will probably be too restrictive for mobile & AFT. This discussion will have to occur at some point soon.
 * http://wikitech.wikimedia.org/view/Eqiad_Migration_Planning
 * Quim rethinking how we do test exercises

Trying out a meeting revamp
Guillaume agrees with Quim that we (ECT, QA, PM...) tend to work in silos even though we talk to each other regularly. We may not have a holistic & collaborative enough approach, and we would probably benefit from more coordination with what we all do So, for next week:
 * We will invite Mariya and Valerie
 * Have your activity statuses updated reasonably recently before the weekly meeting, and read each other's statuses before the meeting
 * At the start of the meeting we will hash out an agenda of stuff to talk about together to collaborate on a higher level

Misc
Travel - Feb 25 - Mar 1 ? :) FOSDEM upcoming - Filipin is giving a talk. Quim helping with merchandise
 * Zeljko and Chris will arrive around Feb 18

Agenda for Jan 22

 * Read each other's statuses and ask questions https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Platform_Engineering
 * Calendar of opportunities for volunteer involvement, as discussed on wikitech-l: Guillaume is planning to tackle this this week, but Quim said he was drafting something up
 * What you can do and when you can get help on IRC - link to How to Contribute http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How_to_contribute
 * and http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Events and the 'opportunities to help' listed on mediawiki.org homepage
 * Guillaume to work on that this week - merging / consolidating some of those pages into a central location, and transclusion/linking involving How To Contribute will happen
 * Travel plans
 * Solidify community testing event for VE Jan 30. http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Visual_Editor_Test
 * EQIAD migration starts TODAY and runs all week. (in case you didn't know)
 * ECT people, When you have a moment please read Guillaume's e-mails from today and comment if appropriate. One of them is about additions to the Roadmap page

Travel &c.
QA: Zeljko presenting at FOSDEM Feb 2 Zeljko and Chris in SF Feb 18-Mar 1 Chris submitting proposals for Agile2013, GTAC, possibly SeConf, OSBridge :-) for purposes of Groups/marketing, OSBridge :-) (no guarantees of being accepted) Everybody: get back to Doreen ASAP re Feb/March get-together? Misc: http://opensourcebridge.org/blog/2013/01/2013-call-for-proposals-now-open/
 * Sumana to look into Wikimania & Amsterdam events (ECT & QA people attending) decision procedure.

January 29

 * Read each other's statuses and ask questions https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Platform_Engineering
 * Add status updates for the January engineering report :) https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2013/January
 * FOSDEM slides draft: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/File:How_to_hack_on_Wikipedia.pdf
 * Volunteer alignment
 * Misc & travel

Current activities
Re visual editor test event: goal: get it done, and get good diversity across languages/geographies. Bug management: FOSDEM slides & icon discussion
 * Chris says: find real issues & engage with real users
 * Future activities - we'll have goals & measures for success
 * https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bug_management/Wild_ideas#Priorities_for_Q1.2F2013
 * FOSDEM slides draft: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/File:How_to_hack_on_Wikipedia.pdf

Volunteer alignment
Discussion starting at thread "Alignment of volunteer developers (was: Re: Status and next steps for Volunteer product managers)" Some of our developers are already intimidated by the idea & process of doing code review We should talk to Chris Steipp about this in late February Next week: talk more about this and come up with next steps
 * Do we add "does this align with movement goals?" into code review guidelines? how?
 * Aligning volunteers with movement goals (often also Foundation goals) is a metagoal for ECT
 * The teams who are working on very high priority goals say they don't have the bandwidth to get more feedback & help from community
 * We ought to fix that!
 * Look in Spring 2011 https://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Product_Whitepaper -- discussing "red links" that the community is best placed to do. Can we help community work on that?
 * How up-to-date is that? Can we still work off this?
 * The two red links that aren't undergoing development are still worth thinking about.
 * Since the WMF prioritized some projects, the others might be considered "leftovers" - what about getting volunteers more involved in making yearly eng roadmap?
 * We have Krenair on Echo; we have Parsoid team interested in teaching other people how to work on Parsoid; we have Siebrand & Quim who pushed for VE testing on non-Latin character sets, along with VE team
 * The red links are big projects - we have trouble coordinating those. What if the big projects depend on these things in MW core?
 * We need to work on the little things! Decrease friction for skilled developers
 * Permissions/+2, and code review.
 * What if some patches are languishing because of alignment problems? Some patches seem like a distraction.
 * Volunteers can get more effective by learning to align themselves with project goals
 * Flow, Athena, Global Profiles ... not as accessible
 * Admin tools, Lua, & other Platform projects - RobLa promises to work with you!
 * We have made big improvements re transparency of what we are doing. But it's hard for people outside WMF to know what are upcoming open tasks on a project.
 * Example: admin tools. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Admin_tools_development/Roadmap, but other teams use Mingle or Trello etc.
 * There could be a tradeoff of slowdown in code review if we add the responsibility of checking alignment
 * Maybe wait on that discussion till after this LevelUp round, in which more people will get code review training