Wikimedia Release Engineering Team/Phab process proposal

Chat log
(aka, "what made Greg type this up?")

17:57 <  csteipp> greg-g: Is there a phab team for QA specifically? hashar took releng off T89353, I wasn't sure if there's a better backlog to get that on.

18:01 <+  greg-g> csteipp: either is fine, we don't have a hard and fast rule on everything being in #releng

Current situation
We have a team project at #Release-Engineering

We have a ton of software projects we maintain (#beta-cluster, #deploy-tooling, #browser-tests, etc, etc etc)

A task can be in any of:
 * Just #releng
 * Just some software project (eg: #beta-cluster)
 * Both in #releng and a software project

There is no consistency and status of a task (eg "in-progress" can be tracked in more than one project workboard).

Problem
Other teams don't know if we're working on something or if we plan on working on it any time soon.

Proposal
Generally, be more "people focused" than "software focused".


 * Add any task you plan to work on to the #releng project
 * corollary: remove the #releng project to tasks we don't plan to work on any time soon
 * This implies that all tasks have a "home" project other than #releng
 * if one doesn't exist then it should probably be created (is Greg's guess). Remember we also have #releng-admin for some things.
 * Use the #releng project workboard to track work progress/status (eg: backlog, ready, in-progress, needs review, done)
 * Use the individual software project workboards to track type of work only if and only if it helps organize the tasks in that project
 * iow: remove the "Next", "in-progress", etc columns
 * The exact makeup of the boards can be defined per-project. We can come up with best practices for these later.
 * If needed there can be "to triage" and "ready/backlog" columns on the project workboard (iow: the triaging step between "new task we (maintainers of the software project) haven't looked at" and "on the #releng board")
 * See eg: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/wikimedia-log-errors/
 * "Being worked on" makes sense here because those tasks are worked on by other people