Thread:Talk:Product development/Notes

(Pasted from previous Discussion page)

Below are some (relatively raw) notes consolidated from various discussions: guillom 23:44, 27 February 2013 (UTC)
 * The goal is to facilitate involvement and provide opportunities for participation with direct calls to action, possibly using a list of tasks or microtasks.
 * The tasks will initially be Product development-focused, but the system will probably be extended to all kinds of activities (as on How to contribute)
 * What system do we use for this?
 * LST from Product development: All the todo items reside on Product development and are marked with LST so that they can be transcluded into activity pages (the same way the Project:Calendar works)
 * Contrary to the Project:Calendar, we won't be transcluding tasks from a lot of different pages, so there isn't a big need for centralization. Besides, many teams use different and inconsistent tools to manage tasks & backlogs, so it doesn't make much sense to build a system too complex (e.g. being able to summon todo items by project, activity type, etc.)
 * Subpages: Some projects use a /Todo subpages to list their upcoming tasks, like Parsoid/Todo. We could generalize that system to all activities.
 * Maintaining a /Todo subpage for each activity increases the maintenance cost of activity pages and isn't needed for many projects
 * LST from activity pages: [current choice] Each activity contains a "Get involved" section marked with LST so it can be transcluded into Product development if so desired. A template can be used to provide a common appearance for those sections and to integrate a tracking category.
 * The "Get involved" section will include links to specific queries in bugzilla, RT, etc. and possibly links to other todo/task/backlog management tools used by engineers, like Trello or mingle. The goal isn't to replace existing workflows that already work for engineering teams, but to make sure that we consistently provide points of entry for contribution.
 * We'll start with Platform & Ops projects, because that's where Product Management resources are most lacking currently. Ideally, the system will be extended to all activities in the future.


 * So, it turns out that we can't use LST from activity pages, because the whole activity page system relies on selective transclusion of the infobox's content. Hopefully, once/if we move them to wikitech and use semantic fields, we'll be able to get rid of this ingenious but super hacky system. In the meantime, I'm not going to transclude the tasks themselves, but link to the proper section for each activity. guillom 17:05, 18 March 2013 (UTC)