WMF product development process/Proposal/2015-10-21

Meeting Agenda:
 * 1) Review and confirm or change goals for next phase of SPDPP
 * 2) Get some teams to make a list of milestones for the quarter (in parallel with existing MPL and Q2 reporting)
 * 3) Build out those milestones from titles to fully fleshed out prototypes, and experiment with tools
 * 4) start prototyping a milestone library
 * 5) Figure out how to proceed, who's involved, what our output and intermediate outputs look like.
 * 6) which teams
 * 7) Who else
 * 8) technologies to try
 * 9) milestones for SPDPP

== how often do we want to update during Q2? = =
 * Monthly? No other suggestions

How much work is this?

 * breaking out Goals into milestones
 * creating criteria for milestones
 * Joel to make an estimate of total hours required

Expected "bundles" of milestones

 * iteratate to hit a milestone
 * ship a product
 * support a service

What are the benefits to participants ?

 * 1) learn and define the process in anticipation of a theoretical future rollout
 * 2) get structure for self-checking progress during the quarter
 * 3) consulting attention - can figure out/discover helpful stuff thanks to focus

Levels of participation

 * 1) one interview to build a skeleton list of milestones.  1 hr.
 * 2) one interview, plus followup interviews monthly. 4 hrs
 * 3) "Full".
 * 4) Create list of milestones
 * 5) develop each milestone into a full list of criteria and RACI
 * 6) Update milestones every month to keep them current
 * 7) "Full plus".  Full, and also validate milestones with stakeholders

What teams are good candidates?
Tried to come up with a taxonomy of WMF teams so that we could get at least one team from each type, but gave up. Based on undefined metrics of team type, this is a diverse set:
 * a horizontal team (CL, DR, comms)
 * VisualEditor, 3+?
 * RelEng (2/3)
 * Discovery (either team), level 2+
 * suggested diversity:
 * Finance
 * Ops

What tools will we use to create and store milestones?

 * Phabricator
 * Wiki pages?

Vocabulary
These words are overloaded in the WMF context and should not be used for anything new:
 * SPDPP = Software Product Development Process Proposal
 * Horizontal: team whose members do work within other teams (Comms, CL, DR, ...)
 * Vertical: Has been used to describe the new "departments" within WMF Engineering. Teams that deliver and maintain products and services to users outside the Foundation.
 * service(s)
 * template

Open questions

 * 1) Is it helpful to cap Milestones at 10 at a time?
 * 2) Can horizontal and other non-product-lifecycle teams get value from this process?
 * 3) Especially for horizontal teams, what's the balance between having milestones and having criteria on other peoples' milestones?
 * 4) How much do our goals change mid-quarter
 * 5) How many bundles do we have?

What will we do with the results?

 * 1) validate or disprove some assumptions behind SPDPP
 * 2) Might change how Q4 quarterly goals are set; this change would have to be ready by ~Feb 2016