User:Cmcmahon/io process

The Release Engineering team interacts with and responds to and anticipates the needs of other teams at WMF involved in the delivery of software features to production.

RelEng oversees many of the tools and frameworks that help in the delivery of software features, from development environments to deployment scripts.

Tools and Frameworks
Here is a list of tools and frameworks that people in Release Engineering understand and maintain. We may not be the only ones who know about each item, but we are all knowledgeable to a certain extent about all of the systems listed here.

Teams and Tools
Release Engineering has direct, reciprocal relationships with at least ten other teams within WMF. Here is a table that attempts to capture the nature of those relationships in terms of the tools and frameworks that we use in common.

How Release Engineering Works
Release Engineering creates, manages, and supports the tools and practices that allow developers to create software easily, manage software safely, and get software to users quickly. As such, we have several input modes for work that we do:

Anticipation
When a software developer says "I would like to be able to do X", we in Release Engineering strive to be able to say in reply "OK, we already know how to do X, let us show you".

For example, no one expected that a public, shared test environment would be particularly valuable until people who are now working in Release Engineering began to make the beta cluster useful. For another example, shared development environments using Vagrant were only an experiment until people who are now working in Release Engineering made them robust and useful.

Mandate
From time to time the Foundation mandates particular practices. Automated browser tests were a mandate in early 2012. A fast deploy cycle was a mandate in early 2013. Replacing Bugzilla with Phabricator was a mandate in 2014. People in Release Engineering were critical to the success of each of these projects.

Reaction
Many of the teams we work with request improvements to the tools and systems that Release Engineering works with. We make every effort to accommodate all such requests we possibly can.