Wikimedia Engineering/2012-13 Goals

'''This page is the beginning of a template for the 2012-13 engineering goals of the Wikimedia Foundation's tech department. It's still in the early developmental stages.'''

Each section should include the following:


 * Goal statement (what are we trying to achieve)
 * Rationale (how does this project relate to our overall strategy)
 * Resources (broad outline of current and additional resources assigned to this project, including % allocation for partially allocated or part-time staff)
 * Activities (what concrete work will be undertaken through this project)
 * Outputs and outcomes (what will the delta be to current state as a result of this project, in terms of metrics, new functionality, new process, and ultimately towards our strategic goals)
 * Timeline (when will major milestones of this project be hit, with focus on the 2012-13 fiscal year)
 * Interdependencies (do we need help from other departments/individuals to successfully reach this goal)

The Big Picture
To create a user experience that's not only engaging but delightful, we will need to continually modernize MediaWiki, Wikimedia's technical infrastructure, and our development processes. This work will certainly not end in July 2013, but we anticipate that we'll be able to reach several important milestones.

Our vision for July 2013 is centered on increasing engagement and reducing barriers:


 * 1) We will modernize the editor. We'll have a fast, scalable visual editor which can perform (single-user) visual editing of any document in the Wikimedia corpus. It will be available to all users on demand. It will be ready to be the new default editing environment, or close to ready. This Visual Editor will be available on the majority of Wikimedia projects, and will ideally be the first user interface you see as a new user.
 * 2) We will connect with the user. We will implement the foundations of a modern notifications system which will be at the center of a user's experience of Wikimedia as a living, breathing community. Whether you're receiving new messages, noticing updates to your watchlist, looking for things to do; whether you're logged out or logged in, on a desktop or on your phone, you'll be able to get updates about what's going on. This is a major architectural undertaking which will support future efforts to improve messaging, task management, project affiliation, mobile contribution methods, and more. It's a modernization project that will help bring Wikimedia's user experience to the level of other highly engaging sites and services.
 * 3) We will increase site responsiveness. When we keep users waiting for a result of their actions, we are treating their time as having no value. This is unacceptable. Wait times reduce the productivity of experienced editors, and likely have a negative impact on the retention of new contributors as well. While we've always disabled functionality that has had a negative performance impact, more systematic profiling and key improvements to slow operations (like the parsing of complex pages) will help us achieve measurable impact.
 * 4) We will engage our mobile audience. We've successfully expanded our mobile reach, and we will continue to do so, especially through programs like Wikipedia Zero.  The bigger challenge on mobile now is to begin growing a community of users who contribute through their smartphone and their tablet. This will include photo contribution, and we'll also want to experiment with simple editing tasks, microtasks like content curation, and improved contribution user interfaces specifically for tablets.  As part of this process, we will bake mobile support fully into MediaWiki core.
 * 5) We will make small changes that have big impact. An entire team will be dedicated to running small experiments and A/B tests focused on the new editor experience: To learn exactly what software or process changes are likely to increase the engagement of new editors who able to make valuable contributions. This will help inform our product priorities going forward, and where changes are obvious wins and easy to productize, we will make them.
 * 6) We will recognize rich media contributors as first class citizens. MediaWiki was built as a text collaboration platform, with support for various media types bolted onto it over time. While tools like the new Upload Wizard have greatly helped simplify media contributions, there is still a lot of work to do to make the experience of adding a picture of video as seamless as the experience of editing text -- and to provide tools for the community to manage quality and metadata.
 * 7) We will create a language-aware user experience. MediaWiki's internationalization team has made tremendous progress in eliminating barriers to participation, especially for Indic languages. But in its current implementation, language merely exists in the form of a set of disconnected user preferences. We don't recognize the user as, say, a Malayalam speaker; we don't provide a coherent user interface for changing content language, chrome, font, input method, etc. And translation of important information for our users is still a very process-intensive task which does not yet feel like a fully natural part of the experience. Beyond further improving language support, the user experience will be at the center of continuing internationalization efforts.

The foundation of our work is our commitment to sustain and protect Wikimedia's core operations. Half a billion people rely on our projects every month. Given the transformative software changes we're making, including the increasing operational complexity involved, this will indeed be a significant challenge beyond simply adding capacity. We will need to re-architect services, data-center operations, and service management as part of our responsibility to maximize uptime, ensure proper backups and publicly available data dumps, and report service availability and performance.

This ambitious plan requires that we continue to improve the way we work:


 * We need to partner with the community in complex feature projects. Whenever we undertake complex projects, our goal should be to make visible progress as quickly as possible, and seek active involvement of volunteers in the process of requirements analysis, design, testing, continued development and maintenance, in short: in the full cycle of work involved in creating a complex project. Work with the community, accordingly, is a full cycle engagement by many individuals with many different skillsets. In the next year, we'll build out a whole new function in engineering: community-driven software testing. We will also continue to improve our approaches to technical communications, outreach, translation, etc.


 * We have to get serious about big data. We've already begun modernizing our analytics infrastructure, and this process will continue. Our goal is to be able to collect and process vast amounts of real-time data about Wikimedia's usage, and to be able to understand patterns in that data at any level. This entails building out a whole new architecture for data collection and processing, and a new flexible dashboard for visualizing key metrics.


 * We need to give the community tools to innovate. The continued development of and support for the Wikimedia Labs project, and continued improvement to on-wiki development capabilities like gadgets and page-embedded JavaScript, help create the foundation for true innovation with low barriers to entry. In addition to building out new services like toolserver-style database replication, we will need to create better authentication/authorization models (like OpenID/OAuth) which will enable development of various tools and applications. Finally, as we've switched our development model to Git, we also have opportunities to create technical interfaces with large existing development communities on sites like GitHub and Gitorious.


 * We can't afford review bottlenecks. Whether it's feedback on features or contributions of code, the process of triaging, responding to, or acting upon any kind of community contribution should be an open one -- and we need to actively work to grow communities of volunteer responders, liaisons, code reviewers, and so on. If we become the bottleneck, we will always fall behind, no matter how responsive we aim to be.


 * We must reduce our technical debt. Our complex legacy codebase continues to weigh heavily on us, and slows down any efforts to transform the user experience. Increasing test coverage, implementing test automation tools, eliminating cruft, and continually deploying code will be essential to increasing the pace of development. The increasing adoption of agile methodology within the Wikimedia engineering organization, and improvements to team culture and team collaboration, are equally important.

Our plan, if resourced, will certainly take us closer to solving the key challenges the Wikimedia Foundation is facing today. Specifically, if we want to increase the retention of new users and the engagement of our community, none of the activities described below are optional -- they can merely be deferred. But even if we undertake all these programs, many frontiers will remain, and each new development will unlock new possibilities and opportunities. Our reach, in other words, will continue to exceed our grasp. We can take comfort in the fact that while many of our challenges are not ours alone, our endeavor is unique and changing the world for the better.

Key Goals

 * 1) Keep the Lights on: An uptime metrics of 99.85% for *.wikipedia.org and *.m.wikipedia.org for wikipedia readers, and a 99.8% for editors.
 * 2) Support growth: Ensure sufficient computing and network capacity to meet demands of the new projects, 30% growth in user traffic and 200% growth in multimedia contents
 * 3) Support new services: Work in partnership with the development team to implement new systems and services
 * 4) Improve data center setup by completing transition to new primary data center in Ashburn, VA (EQIAD)
 * 5) Improve/reduce response times by 70ms for users/readers in Asia and West Coast USA (by redirecting users to the nearest server cluster)
 * 6) Reduce operating cost of the data centers without compromising quality and availability

Team

 * Existing staff & contractors
 * New: IT Systems Engineer position to focus on non-core projects like CRM, Survey Tools, Backups & Archives
 * New: Storage / DBA Engineer to help Asher (who will be spending more time on the Application and Site Performance Project)
 * New: Operations contractor to work on West Coast data center transition (3 months)
 * Wishlist: Operations Security Engineer to ensure that systems/services are set up correctly and securely, and that security risks are mitigated
 * Wishlist: Operations Software Developer to improve tools and systems relied upon in the day-to-day work of the ops team

Ongoing operations work

 * Operational Support
 * Ticket management (RT)
 * Data Center duties
 * Support for deployments and configuration changes, including Wikipedia Zero launches w/ partners


 * Capacity Growth
 * Storage growth expected to be at least about 100%
 * Site traffic (page views) growth expected to be 30 %
 * Network traffic growth expected to be 50%
 * Existing projects (e.g., Analytics & Labs)


 * Site Availability
 * Server refresh of equipment that is >4 years old
 * Service orchestration/automation improvements
 * Disaster recovery and backups


 * Site Security
 * Patching infrastructure security vulnerabilities
 * Applications maintenance


 * Cost savings
 * Reach out to get sponsorship for more Caching Centers around the world, with goals of caching locations in Asia and South America

Interdependencies
Most of the interdependencies are internal to engineering. New services are typically built out in partnership with development teams, and utilize Wikimedia Labs as a staging platform. The site performance team helps provide monitoring and advice to ensure all services operate efficiently.

Key Goals

 * 1) Double the number of users and projects on Wikimedia Labs infrastructure
 * 2) Launch tool labs, new infrastructure for tools, bots, and simple MediaWiki development
 * 3) Stabilize and maintain deployment-prep labs environment for community testing and test automation

Team

 * Ryan Lane (lead)
 * Andrew Bogott (Dev-Ops Engineer)
 * Faidon Liambotis (Ops Engineer)
 * Sara Smollett (Ops Engineer - part time)
 * Chris McMahon (QA Lead) (10%)
 * Antoine Musso (Continuous Integration engineer)
 * New: QA Engineer to work on test automation
 * New: Dev-Ops Program Manager (50%) for cross-functional coordination

Reversing the editor decline
To the extent that Wikimedia's projects are seeing declining or stagnating participation, our goal is to arrest those trends and return to positive growth in high quality contributions. The key activities that will support this goal are undertaken by multiple teams: the editor engagement features team, the editor engagement experimentation team, the visual editor team, the multimedia contribution team, and the mobile contribution team. We also see site performance as strongly linked to editor engagement, but are listing it separately below.

Goal
Reverse the editor decline by making foundational improvements on Wikpedia.

Rationale
Given the results of the  The  Editor Trends Study and the well-documented trends in active editor numbers, the Foundation (as well as the Board) have identified editor retention as one of the two top priorities for the Foundation. While our Strategic Plan sets the number of target contributors to 200k actives per month by 2015, the current trajectory of our projects indicates that by that time, we will have approximately 70-75k active contributors per month (note: Commons contributors are not included in this number). The first step towards the goal set forth in the strategic plan is to reverse the current downward trend.

The first priority of this team is to ensure the retention of new editors to Wikipedia. Every month, there are approximately 15k users that become “New Wikipedians” (approximately 6-7K of these are on the English Wikipedia). This represents a group of users that have managed to reach a minimum level of contributions in face of all the existing  challenges. Our priority should be to make sure that we improve the retention rate of these users as they have already self-selected to  participate.

The second priority of this team is to provide on-ramps that will enable more readers to become contributors. Currently, the distance between being a reader and becoming an editor is way too high. Users need to understand they may edit, find the edit button, learn about policy, learn wikitext, etc.

Much of the work will be foundational in nature. Notifications is a required feature. It may not have a direct impact on getting a user to make their first edit, but is critical in engaging the reader once they’ve chosen to do something. Similarly, a Global Profile would provide a single clearinghouse for user description across wikis and allow for a uniform point of contact to an editor on it. The combination of the two lead rise to key collaboration and community features such as messaging and affiliations (groups).

Resources

 * Existing team: (Fabrice, Dario T., Brandon, Ian B., Ryan Kaldari, Benny S., Andrew G. [part time], Timo Tijhof [part time split with RL2])


 * 2011-12:
 * Req: Engineer (remote, filled on April 16)
 * Req: Front-End Javascript Engineer (opened in Feb)
 * Data Analyst (backfill, if Dario works with E3 team)


 * 2012-13:
 * Additional Development Team (deferred from this years budget)

Activities

 * Remainder of FY2011-12:
 * Article Creation Workflow
 * Page Triage
 * Article Feedback
 * Notifications
 * Global Profile
 * Affiliation: By this we mean to featurize and implement WikiProjects (in code) to allow for real group collaboration. For this to be effective in the 2007+ world, Notifications and Global Profile are a pre-requisite.
 * Messaging: Can be implemented assuming Global Profile and Notifictions are in place. On the back end, this is an extensions of the Notifications infrastructure (one-one user-directed notification). This will be deferred from this fiscal year because the amount of front-end UI work that will need to be done.
 * Curation processes (ongoing)
 * Maintenance of existing features (ongoing)

Outputs and Outcomes

 * Quantitative metrics TBD, but here are some examples:
 * Increase second-month retention rate to 37% (up from 33%)
 * Increase number New Wikipedians/month to the English Wiikipedia by 10%

Milestones by quarter
Note that the timeline also needs to factor in two aspects.
 * 1) maintenance of ongoing and completed projects
 * 2) extra load from contracting services winding down
 * 3) other curation process improvements as iterated from existing activities or provided as results from the EE Experimentation team

(up to) FY2011-12: the existing team will be working on the following features until at least end of May 2012:
 * Article Creation Workflow
 * Article Feedback: Finish v5 iteration
 * Page Triage
 * prototyped Notifications infrastructure

Interdependencies

 * Mobile
 * E3 team

Editor engagement experiments
This team is focused on smaller, short-term experiments which demonstrate measurable impact on editor numbers and can be productized

Goals/Budget team: Karyn, Howie, Alolita, Zack, community team ..

Goal
Reverse the editor decline by experimenting with point features. The output of these experiments has to be measurable and needs supporting metrics gathering.

Rationale
Much of the rationale for Editor Engagement Features is applicable to this team.

The difference between the two teams is how they address the problem of editor decline. While the former team (EE) will focus on medium- to long-term foundational projects, the EEE team will focus on short-term experiments. The EEE team's goal is not to build production-quality features. The features will typically be "low(er) hanging fruit". This, however, does not prevent this team from productizing a feature that they find promising. The goal, however, should be to optimize for speed (vs. production-quality characteristics such as scalability, localization, cross-browser support). This team will also improve the A/B testing and metrics measurement infrastructure to provide the tooling for measuring impact of these experiments.

Resources

 * In FY2011-12 Plan:
 * Product Owner
 * Community support
 * Jr. Front-end Dev
 * Senior Dev/Scrummaster
 * UX Designer
 * Data analyst
 * In FY2012-13 Plan:
 * Front-end Dev
 * Back-end Dev

Activities
The exact backlog for this team has not yet been determined. It will likely consist of small experiments such as:
 * User warning templates
 * Size, wording, location, color of buttons
 * Microtasks as new engagement strategy
 * Email notifications (features that can be enabled relatively easy with existing Mediawiki functionality)

Output and Outcomes
Impact assessment of conducted experiments will occur on an ongoing basis.

Ongoing process

 * Objective is to run at least one experiment every week. Experiments may extend in duration past the weekly cycle.
 * Experiments may be product or community focused, e.g. policy test vs. A/B test of a feature.
 * Given the experimental nature of mobile contribution efforts, the team will work closely with mobile to identify potential experiments.
 * The team may on occasion step out of the weekly cycle to productize an improvement that is a) proven to have high impact, b) cannot be taken on by another team, c) will take at most one month to fully productize.

Interdependencies

 * Code Review and Deployment support (Platform team)
 * Labs support (Platform / Ops teams)
 * Analytics: Most, if not all, of the E3 features will require measurement that existing functionality (e.g., existing click-tracking extension) does not cover.

Goals:
The proposed Multimedia team will build features that will enable easier contribution of multimedia content to Wikimedia projects. Specifically, the following areas will be addressed:


 * Improve curation tools to manage new contribution streams
 * Enable multimedia contributions in a more user-friendly and seamless manner
 * Improve display of multimedia content

Rationale
At the present time, the number of Commons contributors is one of the few  editor engagement metrics that are increasing. Over the past year, Commons has seen 25% year-over-year growth in contributors. The web is also moving towards more visually driven interfaces, so having strong multimedia support helps WMF meet the expectations of modern readers.

In addition, 1.19 and Swift provides the technology infrastructure that previously was not available to support the storage and use multimedia files. This infrastructure is planned to be in place during the next fiscal year, making it feasiable to invest more heavily in multimedia.

Resources
There are currently no resources assigned to Multimedia.

Proposed resources:
 * New: Product Manager
 * New: Senior Software Developer
 * New: Front-end Developer
 * New: Back-end Developer
 * Interaction Designer (shared, 25-50%)

Activities

 * Support photo upload features developed by the mobile team with backend improvements and curation tools.
 * Improve integration between Wikimedia Commons and client projects like Wikipedia or third party users
 * Improve display/playback of various types of multimedia content
 * Support for competitions/contests

Output and Outcomes

 * Target: xx commons contributors/month

Milestones by quarter
(FY2011-2012):
 * TimedMediaHandler on Commons (if not, fold into Q2 2012):
 * Multiple derivatives (bitrates, formats), including WebM
 * Subtitle support
 * Transcode existing videos on Commons

Interdependencies

 * Mobile will hit us in Q1 with their first pilots related to mobile photo upload. Likely we won't see immediate uptake, but if the team is successful in driving mobile media contributions, this will dictate a strong focus on curation/quality control tools early on -- a good problem to have.
 * Will drive a lot of storage load on Site Operations, and we may need to build out a larger job queuing and transcoding processing infrastructure as TimedMediaHandler goes online, video on commons grows drastically, or the community comes to a decision on policy supporting (or not) licensed encumbered codecs (i.e. H.264 output for mobile devices older than iOS5 and Android ICS).

Visual Editor
Goals/Budget team: Howie, Terry, Trevor, Gabriel, Roan, Rob Moen

Goal Statement
To create a reliable rich-text editor that allows for editing underlying wikitext on multiple platforms (including mobile) and facilitate a possible future implementation of real-time collaborative editing.

To solve this problem a working two-way parser is needed. In the current platform implementation, wikitext is converted directly to output but there is no association of the output to the underlying wikitext. Part of the Visual Editor involves a parser that translates wikitext into a working two-way data model, and an API that provides reliable client-server interaction on this model.

Rationale
This relates directly to the editor retention issue:
 * The |decline in new contributor growth is the single most serious challenge facing the Wikimedia movement since 2007.
 * Board feels that editor retention is the most important focus for the Foundation.

How the visual editor addresses the above problem:


 * A visual editor removes the two major impediments for new or inexpereinced editors, thus increasing the number of Wikimedia contributors:
 * 1) The technical expertise to deal with wiki markup and templating usage is a high hurdle
 * 2) The UI for editing is terrible
 * Many key features for Editor Engagement are dependent on a working two-way parser that the project is building. Examples:
 * An annotation/collaboration (e.g. comments in Google Doc) Talk Page replacement needs access to the underlying wikitext from within the output UI for positioning.
 * Improvements for directed forms of user involvement (microtasking) can only be hooked into with a user-friendly, context-sensitive UI when the output to underlying markup language is available programmatically
 * Visual diffs would now be possible and assist new and existing editors with evaluating changes to the Wiki.
 * Other key features for Editor Engagement are dependent on a working visual editor. Examples:
 * Messaging would probably occur in abbreviated wikitext and would require a lightweight visual editor.
 * A VE opens the door to other modes of communication that aren't as heavy with convention as "Talk Pages" such as chat, forums, threaded discussion systems, and annotations.
 * Recording time-sensitive diffs is possible within the visual editor framework. This could help editors catch things hard to find in a regular diff. (For instance, a single change where an malicious editor moves a block of text from one area to another, and then buries a policy-violating change inside the block become evident when it is played back in time.)

Activities

 * 1) Make the new parser the feature-complete for Wikitext markup and rendering
 * 2) Build a complete client-side data model that allows for support to be extended.
 * 3) Build a working user interface (UI: inspector, toolbar, contextual menus) that is configurable and extensible. A generalized Inspector System
 * 4) Research how to handle difficult parts of pages like images and tables
 * 5) Provide graceful fallback with primitive editing support for unsupported Wikitext elements and templates.
 * 6) Possible further research into collaboration-based features (through 3rd party or GSoC)

Outputs and outcomes

 * A feature complete parser that passes all the unit tests:
 * Should not break existing content
 * Some obscure wikitext patterns may need to be renormalized and converted to fix the above goal, but the target behavior is to have the parser without the above
 * Should mark output content so bi-directional roundtripping does not modify the original wikitext
 * Will hopefully become the canonical description for the underlying wikitext (folded into MediaWiki core)
 * A working parser allows for two-way interaction between the user interface and the underlying wikitext
 * Ability to load and save an entire wiki page using the visual editor.
 * Ability to extend the user interface with user-created gadgets and/or wiki-specific features and extensions (e.g. allowing the citations extension to add UI functionality for also enabling ISBN lookups, i18n, etc within the Visual Editor).

Timeline

 * By the start FY 2012-2013:
 * April: Complete migration from EditSurface to ContentEditable, including port of UI and finishing of Data Model.
 * May: Most unit tests of the parser pass. First deployments and iterations in the sandbox. Begin API for inspector and toolbar UI
 * June: First release candidate of editor able to edit and save a subset of real-life articles (open-edit-save). Many parts will not be editable in visual mode so some mechanism for handling unsupported feature will be resolved (render output as clickable area with an editor of underlying wikitext)
 * 1Q FY 2012-2013:
 * mediawiki.org deployments and iteration
 * full API for pluggable nodes
 * Spec and complete other in-between deployment steps: new page creation, sentence editing, mobile editing
 * 2Q FY 2012-2013:
 * en wiki deployments and iteration (New Page creation is not an ideal candidate here because of required support for things like a VE citations to ensure page survivability)
 * Begin work on other Editor Engagement touchpoints: "Edit-in-place" capability, readable diffs, …
 * integration of collaborative editing work from GSoC student, if applicable.

Actual times and specific features become difficult to specify because team is currently operating without a product analyst. But the way the following targets are:


 * 1) Iterative releases on mediwikki.org
 * 2) Make it safe to use on English Wikipedia
 * 3) Allow for "dark" releases (with opt-in) and testing on english Wikipedia
 * 4) As it is iterated all features added will have two modes on opt-in
 * 5) Safe mode
 * 6) Enable all experimental modules.

Some things that may be addressed for the remaning of the fiscal year:
 * table editing
 * lists editing
 * images and captions editing?
 * visual editing of templates?
 * visual diffs (change playback)

Timeline for parsoid beyond Visual Editor integration (i.e. MW core integration) is TBD as parsing resources are tightly constrained, at the moment. Note the parsoid is a blocker for many things in the above timeline.

Resources
Cooperation with Wikia:
 * Original resources:
 * Trevor Parscal (ES, UI)
 * Brion and Neil (parser, data model - originally assigned to this, but were re-assigned elsewhere)
 * Gabriel Wicke (parser - 20 hours starting late Oct 2011)
 * After February 1, 2012 established most of full team:
 * Rob Moen (UI - from Editor Engagement).
 * Roan Kattouw (data model, deploy - 65ish%, other time split with other projects)
 * Audrey Tang (parser - 5 hrs since Feb 1, 2012)
 * Open reqs filled by FY 2011-2012:
 * Senior Engineer (parser)
 * Product Analyst
 * Inez Korczynski (CE, may assist in parser)
 * Christian Williams (CE, started around Feb 1st)

System resources:
 * Currently no need for additional resources
 * When in production, it may be possible that there is a need for some node.js infrastructure (this is not finalized). Though this is likely to be contained by repurposing existing parser infrastructure with the more efficient parser.
 * If collaboration feature is added, there might be a need for additional resource infrastructure

Interdependencies
Wikia:
 * Their main goal is to replace CK editor infrasturcture with the CE Visual Editor.
 * A secondary goal is to prevent the pitfalls of divergent codebases that they have in MediaWiki core.

Editor Engagement Team. At some point there needs to be sync up:
 * Assist in UI problems (how to edit tables)
 * Social aspect of visual editor (multiple contributors)
 * Editor engagement usage of the parser and the visual editor

Ops assistance:
 * Review node.js infrastructure developed in Labs

Mobile (VE acts as a provider of resources to mobile):
 * Current design should support mobile editing (Android ICS and iOS 5) which should facilitate adoption by the mobile team

Mobile Contribs
This team is under the Mobile team below.

Site performance
Goals/Budget team: RobLa, CT, Tim Starling, Asher, Preilly, MarkB, Terry

Goal statement
For 2012-13, we would like to professionalize our process of performance engineering. In so doing, we plan to appreciably improve the user experience for editors and readers, and achieve savings in hardware requisitions.

Rationale
It is a well-studied phenomenon that even small delays in response time (e.g half of a second) can result in sharp declines in web user retention. As a result, popular websites such as Google and Facebook invest heavily in site performance initiatives, and partially as a result, remain popular. Formerly popular sites (such as Friendster) suffered due to lack of attention to these issues. Wikipedia must remain usable and responsive in order for the movement to sustain its mission.

Currently, complicated and popular articles (e.g. "Barack Obama") often take 30 or more seconds to render when the cache is invalidated for an article (e.g. when the article is edited, or when an included template is edited). While article rendering is possibly an extreme example, we have several other pockets of our systems that have similar problems.

Our volunteer and paid developers have few tools to understand how their work impacts performance (for good or for bad). Furthermore, even editors have an impact on performance, but they have few tools to understand what that impact is.

We need to invest in tools that make it possible for developers and editors to know what impact they are having, both so that we can accurately assess when a feature is creating a performance problem for us, and so that we can better understand the impact of our investment in performance. That will give us the visibility we need to address the most important issues, instead of relying on gut feel and lore to decide what is "good" or "bad" for site responsiveness. This will allow us to focus our effort on the most meaningful of improvements. And of course, we need to use this information to improve site performance.

We made some progress in 2011-12. Asher Feldman deployed many performance measurement tools such as Graphite (publicly available at gdash.wikimedia.org, with more tools available to staff). Tim Starling finished our disk-backed object cache project, which by one measure decreased average response time by 80-100 milliseconds. Tim also intends to make significant progress on introducing Lua as a new, faster template language alternative. However, neither Asher nor Tim have had the ability to focus sufficiently on performance to make the kind of progress that we need to make, since both play critical roles in the day-to-day operation of the website.

Resources

 * Tim Starling (75%)
 * Asher Feldman (75%) - contingent on filling a new DBA role in Operations
 * Performance engineer (80%)
 * Dev-ops PM (25%)
 * Potentially Technical Product Analyst (25%) to support Lua-related requirements analysis and community roll-out

Activities

 * Mediawiki improvements
 * Embedded Lua scripting support for MediaWiki
 * Apache CPU/memory utilization improvements (parsing, other PHP-intensive work)
 * Cache utilization
 * Perceived performance
 * Other software improvments
 * Remote services (search)
 * HipHop(VM) - contingent upon technology being ready for deployment
 * Operational improvements
 * Study I/O performance (Swift, NFS)
 * Optimize use of Squid/Varnish/other middleware
 * Tune network buffers
 * Turn up caching centers to bring data closer to users and reduce latency.
 * Deploy new technologies (e.g. Flash Drives, varnish)
 * Tools and measurement
 * Deploy tools for profiling, analysing and targeting
 * Tools for PHP developers
 * Tools for template authors

Outputs and outcomes
At the end of 2012-13, we would like to achieve the following:
 * Markedly better article rendering performance, rendering "slow" (>30 second) pages 4x faster with comparable functionality and editor workflow
 * More informed template authors with the tools necessary to avoid performance pitfalls and ability to keep page rendering time at acceptable levels.
 * More informed developers with the tools necessary to avoid performance pitfalls.
 * Reduce ping times from all worldwide locations to <150ms according to Watchmouse and site24x7.com. Reduce ping times to all european and North American locations to <80ms according to the above resources.

Timeline

 * July-September 2012
 * Experimental, limited deployment of Lua to the production cluster.
 * Detailed survey of performance landscape
 * Iterative improvement of performance tooling for developers
 * October-December 2012
 * Ramping up Lua to play gradually larger role on site, supporting common templates with poor performance characteristics
 * Page rendering performance tools to help assess impact of Lua
 * Iterative improvement of performance tooling for developers
 * More widespread improvement based on lessons learned during detailed survey
 * January-March 2013
 * Full deployment of Lua to the production cluster (contingent upon October assessment)
 * Iterative improvement of performance tooling for developers
 * More widespread improvement based on lessons learned during detailed survey
 * April-June 2013
 * Iterative improvement of performance tooling for developers
 * More widespread improvement based on lessons learned during detailed survey
 * Initial testing of HipHop(VM) (subject to availability of underlying tech)

Interdependencies

 * Visual Editor / Parser team (Lua scripting)

Mobile
Goals/Budget Team: Tomasz (budget owner), Phil Chang (product manager), Patrick Reilly (sr engineer), Jon Robson (front end dev), mobile team

Increasing Contributions
Overall narrative note:

Upload is our first contribution feature. It will be completed for an experimental community trial by July. At that point we'll shift to experimenting with ways to engage casual users in multimedia contributions. This will interface and depend on the multimedia team that's proposed in the plan. The multimedia team will develop desktop focused curation tool, while the mobile team will develop mobile focused curation tools for multimedia.

The mobile focused curation tools may be our first microtask experiment on mobile devices. If we find that mobile multimedia contributions are not taking off, we will likely shift contribution efforts to other initiatives.

With regard to mobile editing, we are not making any assumptions about what forms of editing are likely to be used. However, all those assumptions require baseline support within the mobile infrastructure for text parsing and text manipulation. This is an infrastructure project that will likely not pay off immediately. We can target early text contribution efforts, such as block-level editing and new page creation, but ultimately our priorities will depend on where we see productive user adoption.

For microtasks, the mobile team will likely need to interface closely with the experimentation team, which already has a list of microtasks it would like to try, but will bias towards desktop experiments if we do not have proper orientation towards the mobile UI and APIs.

Goal

 * To facilitate contributions on mobile devices

Rationale

 * Our mobile page growth continues to be 5-15% every month but these users can't contribute. In order to reverse the trend of editor decline we need to capture new users coming online primarily (and sometimes only) on mobile devices
 * Board supports growth in areas that support mobile contributions

Resources

 * Existing Team (Phil, Patrick, Jon, Arthur, Lindsey, SDE)
 * 2012-13
 * 2 Front end engineers due to heavey user facing features
 * Yuvi (part time)

Activities

 * Media (Upload Wizard)
 * Commons continues to grow as a user community and mobile can help to accelerate and simplify media contributions.
 * Image Curation - If our mobile projects succeed then we'll have to address how were going to review the wealth of content coming into our pejects
 * Editing
 * We have to start supporting editing functionality on mobile devices. This is the key source of contribution and our mobile users can't be treated as second class contributors.
 * Micro Tasks - We need to reach out past edits if we want to tap into the full potential of mobile devices.
 * GPS
 * Article drafts
 * Actions on red links
 * Article Feedback
 * Tablet Support
 * Create a third proto type layout that is geared for large touch devices
 * Extend mobile visual editor work to tablets
 * On going app releases to reach a broader contributor base
 * Mobile Commons
 * Build a custom mobile experience for Commons to better attract contributions

Output

 * Mobile will finally provide its 2 billion pages views a month with a simple and easy set of contributory pipelines. Since mobile is seeing the biggest rise in readership it only makes sense to start funneling those users into contributors. This can immensly solve our editor retention problem.

Timeline

 * Upload Wizard - Q1 Fiscal 2012
 * Micro Contributions - Q2 Fiscal 2012
 * Simple Editng - Q3 Fiscal 2013

Interdependencies

 * Visual Editor
 * Editor Engagement Team

Developing Alternate Access Methods
Goals/Budget Team: Tomasz (budget owner), Phil Chang (product manager), Patrick Reilly (sr engineer), Kul Wadhwa, mobile team

Goal

 * Lower the global barrier for access to our projects by providing low cost and low tech solutions to access Wikipedia.

Rationale
Data charges and technological barriers should not impede access to our projects. There are easy ways that we can reach a significant amount of people if we are innovative with how they can access Wikipedia. Through partnerships, sms/ussd, S40 J2ME we have

Resources

 * Partner Support Engineer (PSE)
 * Additional PSE to support double digit partner growth
 * Praekelt Foundation (contractor)
 * Emmanuel (contractor)

Activities

 * Zero Partnerships
 * Remove Technical Obstacles
 * Vumi (SMS/USSD)
 * Reach millions of new users who don't have data plans
 * J2ME
 * Reach many billions more users who are not upgrading to smart phones
 * Reach
 * OpenZim+PhonGap
 * Support downloading of offline collections withing the official Wikipedia app

Outputs

 * Broadending global reach
 * Capacity support for Zero build out

Timeline

 * 5 - 10 new country launches every two months

Interdependencies

 * Operations
 * Tech Support Manager (Global Dev)

Goal

 * To broaden the reach of the Wikimedia Mobile projects through developer training, conference outreach, user testing of betas, and general evangeslim

Rationale

 * Our mobile projects have the potential to have a lot of developer interaction. Currently were engaging with a small developer base but we could be doing so much more. Given someone focused on outreach we could increase the number of mobile developers, increase the knowledge of the open mobile web and include more non developers in our projects

Resources

 * Community Liason
 * Tomasz

Activities

 * Crowd Sourcing organization for beta test
 * App developer outreach to better understand what our API can't do
 * Brazil Hackathon
 * Conferences
 * Open Mobile Web evangelism

Outputs

 * More volunteer particiaption within mobile

Timeline

 * Brazil Hackathon in September
 * Strong presence at FOSDEM, likely in February 2013
 * Presence at MobileWorldCongress, likely also in February 2013

Interdependencies

 * Global Dev
 * TL;DR

Improving the internal infrastructure
Goal: Evolving the infrastructure that powers mobile

Rationale

 * Our mobile projects have been extremely successfull thus far but can't continue to scale at our growth rate unless we better integrate them into the core of MediaWiki, simplify our data sets, build a stronger API, and get better analytics. We have to merge the common functions of MobileFrontend into core so that we can work with non mobile developers to develop mobile solutions for our organizational goals.

Resources

 * Patrick
 * Arthur
 * Jon
 * Max
 * Brion (consulting)

Activities

 * Integrating MobileFrontend (MF) into core
 * Allows any WMF developer to create mobile interfaces
 * API
 * Extend for better data re-use
 * Increase performance for a better user experience
 * Migrate to resource loader
 * Remove the need to reparse page content
 * Open Street Maps
 * Deploy production service for internal use
 * Integrate into mobile web experience
 * WikiData/GPS
 * Deploy GeoHack replacement to store GPS data for mobile re-use
 * Expand Mobile Analytics
 * Migrate away form WURFL to a better licensed solution
 * Internationalization
 * Web fonts
 * Language Selection

Output

 * Mobile will be a core part of MediaWiki
 * Developers outside of the mobile department will be able to easily develop mobile solutions
 * Decrease the time for each mobile project due to improved QA
 * Faster API due to optimizations
 * GPS read/write API

Interdependencies

 * Platform
 * Features
 * Analytics

Internationalization
Goals/Budget team: Alolita (budget owner), Siebrand (product manager), team, +consultation with engineering/product leads

Goal

 * To broaden the reach of the Wikimedia projects including reader and editor engagement by developing Mediawiki language support tools (i18n), developing translation tools for Wikimedia L10N communities, user testing with language community, collecting feedback, collaboratively working with other open source projects to grow our language support and developer groups.

Rationale

 * Wikimedia projects support 284 languages today with a community of translators and some tools. The i18n engineering team is developing tools for input methods, output methods, search, translations, supporting mobile and editor engagement tools such as visual editor and evangelize usage of these tools in various language communities.

Resources

 * Alolita Sharma
 * Siebrand Mazeland
 * Niklas Laxstrom
 * Santhosh Thottingal
 * Amir Aharoni
 * Gerard Meijssen
 * Pau Giner
 * UI designer
 * Font designer
 * Software Developer

Activities

 * Input methods / Onscreen keymaps
 * Output methods / WebFonts
 * Language settings/selection
 * Translation
 * Search
 * Dictionaries for translation tools, Wikisource
 * Mobile I18n support
 * Visual Editor I18n support/integration
 * Metrics/measurement statistics/impact assessment
 * Language support tool APIs (for 3rd party use)
 * Improve QA / testing
 * Incorporate community feedback loop for I18n tools
 * Improve RTL support

Output

 * Improved UI/UX experience for language tools
 * Improved i18n/L10N support for Visual Editor/Editor Engagement tools
 * Increased support for language IMEs (complete Indic language support, add other non-Roman language family support)
 * Increased support for language fonts/scripts (complete Indic language support, add other non-Roman language family support)
 * Increased support for translations (tools development, APIs)

Timeline
Q1 (Jul-Sep):
 * UI/UX User Experience Improvements
 * Unified Language Selector (ULS)
 * Add more languages: i18n framework extension for scripts/fonts/IMEs
 * Tool Usage Metrics
 * Translate enhancements
 * Mobile: i18n support for mobile phones
 * Free and open fonts available for more languages

Q2 (Oct-Dec):
 * Continue Convergence for L10N, I18N tools
 * Add more languages: Continue i18n framework extension for scripts/fonts/IMEs
 * i18n Visual Editor Support
 * Mobile: Library for Input Method Editors on mobile devices
 * Translate enhancements
 * Free and open fonts available for more languages

Q3 (Jan-Mar):
 * Add more languages: i18n framework extension for scripts/fonts/IMEs
 * Generalize Libraries for WebFonts, Narayam
 * Search
 * Mobile: i18n support for tablets
 * Free and open fonts available for more languages

Q4 (Apr-Jun):
 * Add more languages: i18n framework extension for scripts/fonts/IMEs
 * Free and open fonts available for more languages
 * Integrate dictionaries for translation tools, Wikisource
 * Sorting

Interdependencies

 * Product support (Product team)
 * UI/UX support (Product team)
 * QA (Platform team)
 * Labs (Tech Ops team)

Analytics
Goals/Budget team: Diederik, RobLa, CT, Dave, Howie, PMs, Terry

Key Goals

 * Data Services Platform &mdash; Construct a compute cluster to store, analyze, and query all incoming data of interest to the community, including traffic data, application instrumentation, and edit/editor data.
 * Intelligence for Institutional Goals &mdash; Intermediate solutions for:
 * Supporting the new Editor Engagement Experiments team
 * Editors by Geography
 * Pageviews by Mobile Carrier
 * Instrumentation: WMF Mobile apps, Click Tracking, RevTagging (Account Creation, Edits)
 * Improvements to the high-level metrics Report Card

Rationale
The Wiki Movement has a chronic need for analytics. We need it to understand our editors, to encourage growth, to engender diversity, to focus our resources, to improve our engineering efforts, and to measure our success. It permeates nearly all our goals, yet our current analytics capabilities are underdeveloped: we lack infrastructure to capture editor, visitor, clickstream, and device data in a way that is easily accessible; our efforts are distributed among different departments; our data is fragmented over different systems and databases; our tools are ad-hoc.

Rather than merely improve existing jobs and data pipelines, the Analytics Team aims to construct a Data Services Platform capable of mining intelligence from all datastreams of interest, providing this insight in real time, and exposing it via an API to power applications, mash up into websites, and stream to devices.

Planning Documents

 * Analytics/2012-2013 Roadmap
 * Analytics/2012-2013 Roadmap/Hardware

Resources

 * Capital expenditure for cluster hardware.
 * Product Manager: Diederik van Liere
 * Engineers: David Schoonover, Andrew Otto.

Q1

 * DSP Planning &mdash; Finalize and document:
 * Overall system architecture
 * Data collection design
 * Pipeline integration points (web servers, MediaWiki core + extensions, application instrumentation)
 * Batch job design for core indices and materialized views (especially typical web traffic metrics, editor and edit metrics)
 * Query and API design
 * Stand up preliminary processing cluster
 * Components:
 * Databases
 * Batch processing system
 * Query components
 * Support servers (ZK, monitoring, etc)
 * Puppetize configurations
 * Successfully process and query an ad-hoc job

Q2

 * Offline Batch Data Imports
 * Import ad-hoc dataset
 * Perform ad-hoc analysis
 * Pixel Service (REST tracking endpoint)
 * Code development and testing
 * ETL Stream Processing components
 * Code for jobs (Storm topologies) performing:
 * IP lookup for geo, mobile carrier
 * Anonymization
 * Canonicalize data
 * Systems integration (pull from DBs, push to other standing queries/batch)
 * Core Batch Jobs
 * Support for top-k(*), sum(cardinality estimators, counters, etc)
 * Create indices on request traffic (by timeseries, URL, geo, mobile)
 * Create indices on edits and editor data (by timeseries, wiki page, geo, editor-activity, editor-age)
 * Internal Query Dashboard
 * Integration with Hive/Pig
 * Service some internal queries on ad-hoc data

Q3

 * Server Agent (request data import streams)
 * Integration with web servers & caches
 * Non-production load testing of pixel service and server agents
 * Buffering and streaming (Scribe/Flume?)
 * System integration & zero-downtime testing
 * Core Batch Jobs
 * Create traffic funnel indices
 * Add referrer data to by-URL indices

Q4

 * Batch Import
 * Editor userdata from SQL production servers
 * Internal Query Dashboard
 * Job control functions
 * Job tuning; internal stats about runtimes

Unscheduled (Q3+ or FY+1)
Aimed at Q3/Q4 if possible, but FY 2013-2014 otherwise.


 * External Query Gateway
 * Design batch jobs for performance-sensitive (API-exposed) metrics
 * Create API for select metrics
 * Developer Accounts
 * API keys, OAuth
 * QoS Controls
 * Job resource usage & execution time monitoring, controls, throttling
 * API rate-limiting
 * Abuse monitoring and filtering
 * UI and signup workflows
 * External documentation
 * Generic MediaWiki Tracking Extension
 * Rewrite of Clicktrack and CentralNotice for new A/B testing extension.
 * Internal PHP API for core
 * Internal PHP API for extensions
 * JS API for on-page tracking
 * Pixel Service (REST tracking endpoint)
 * Integration with mobile app instrumentation
 * Integration with click-tracking
 * Integration with rev-tagging
 * Integration with MediaWiki core
 * Core Batch Jobs
 * Session analysis (views per visit, bounces, per-page {top in-pages, top out-pages}
 * Search analysis (internal & external search referrers, keyword top-k)
 * Other Batch Imports
 * Wiki content via SQL mirror or XML dump

Interdependencies

 * Biggest unknown is the availability of hardware. This planning assumes that the 10 node cluster is available from April 1, and subsequent hardware is available from August 1st.
 * Significant work with ops in migrating the cluster from pre-production setup to production use
 * Close work with data consumers in and outside of the Foundation to ensure solutions meet their needs

Goal statement
There are three main goals for the Fundraising engineering team:
 * To maintain and improve donation pipleine reliability
 * To improve privacy and security compliance
 * To begin to provide business with better analytics they need to reach the Foundation’s fundraising goals.

Rationale
Fundraising is the source to the rest of Wikimedia's sink.

Resources

 * Katie Horn- Technical Lead
 * Jeremy P. - Fundraising Engineer
 * Jeff Green (50%) - Operations Engineer
 * + 2 full-time engineering reqs TBD by end of FY 2012
 * (non-Engineering, Peter Gehres - Fundraiser Production)

[ current system resources allocation to be provided by ops above (migration from EQIAD) ]

Activities

 * Maintain all pieces of the current donation pipeline
 * DonationInterface extension
 * Anti-fraud measures
 * Additional payment gateways
 * Maintain integration with third parties
 * Ensure security (in progress)
 * Improve redundancy and logging to aid in the event of unforeseen circumstances
 * CentralNotice extension
 * FundraiserStatistics extension
 * FundraiserLandingPage extension
 * ContributionTracking extension
 * CiviCRM (customer relationship database) maintenance and improvements for bare usability. Currently there are major bugs and scalability issues that WMF has run up against.
 * ActiveMQ (queuing)
 * Research into alternatives for ActiveMQ
 * Code changes in most other parts of the pipeline when we find one
 * Improvements to reliability of donation pipeline
 * CentralNotice extension: needs better A/B testing support within the same geolocation bucket
 * Third-party service automatic health check system
 * Upgrade payments cluster to more recent version of MediaWiki (try to keep it near-ish to the version on the cluster
 * Code coverage (unit tests)
 * Documentation of the existing systems.
 * Bulk mailing infrastructure (CiviCRM can't handle it, current structure was done with ad hoc scripts)
 * Greater level of PCI (Data privacy and security) compliance
 * Analytics and reporting:
 * Improve the current analytics system to allow for real-time reporting as well as increase scalability, security and transparency
 * Donation auditing - Many numbers are required by finance and global dev throughout the year. Tools that exist to get these numbers must be written and maintained.
 * Improve the methods used to build "missing" data from our payment processors, logs, and contribution tracking data.

Outputs and outcomes

 * Payment metrics
 * New payment methods
 * Additional payment processors (required for some new payment methods as well as redundancy)
 * Redundant payments clusters between pmtpa and eqiad with failover
 * CiviCRM metrics
 * If it is still running without crashing or frustating business (too much).
 * Higher certifications level measures PCI compliance
 * Code coverage for testing is measureable against the total code base
 * Payments cluster version lag versus current MediaWiki is currently 2 behind 1.19.
 * Better caching configuration for donatewiki
 * Health and Alert System for health (or lack thereof) of the pipeline for high-traffic times, capable of notifying us when immediate action is necessary
 * API for CentralNotice allowing for automated checking of banner allocations and alerts
 * Automated disabling of payment methods for down payment processors (currently very time consuming and error-prone)
 * Selenium testing for banners and landing pages to ensure that changes to templates and JavaScript do not have negative effects
 * Improved transparency to donors with regard to donations and other fundraiser metrics
 * Improved analytics system that allows fundraising creative and production teams to iterate rapidly with near real-time information
 * Fix CiviCRM or improve mass-mailing infrastructure to send emails to current and past donors

Timeline

 * Start of FY 2012-2013 - fundraising tech fully staffed
 * Late summer/Early fall 2012 - Freeze for new payment providers
 * Fall 2012 - Freeze for new payment methods for existing payment providers
 * Nov/Dec 2012 - Annual fundraiser
 * Jan/Feb 2013 - Wrap up of 2012 fundraiser
 * Feb/March 2013 - Kick-off of 2013 fundraiser campaign and planning

Interdependencies
The fundraising tech team works closely with the fundraising production and fundraising creative teams that are part of the Community Department. The team also works with LCA to ensure compliance with various privacy policies, execution of contracts with payment providers, as well as community support.

Any security engineer that we hire will work closely with the FR-tech team to ensure that our systems are secure.

Analytics - There is currently nobody dedicated to fundraiser analytics.

MediaWiki platform
Goals/Budget team: RobLa, TimS, Sumana, Chad, Brion, Roan, team

Rationale
The MediaWiki software at the heart of our software infrastructure needs continuous modernization in order to support our ambitious initiatives and in order to improve site stability.

In 2012-13, there are core technologies need to support new innovation. We need support for new MediaWiki revision types and some level of data transclusion to support Wikimedia Deutschland's Wikidata effort. A number of parts of the core software will need to be reworked in order to support flexible methods of user notifications. OAuth will allow users the ability to securely grant new tools the ability to take actions on their behalf (such as transfer images from other websites), without needing to share their password with anyone.

Our software also needs many improvements to increase our operational efficiency and stabilize our infrastructure. The way we configure our software (global variables) hasn't changed since the very early days of the project, despite enormous problems in maintainabilty, ability to test components, and ability to flexibly configure our systems. We require shell access (and often staff time) to configure many things that site admins should be empowered to change. We need to more fully support our new ability to serve from multiple datacenters, by making it possible to seamlessly switch between data centers without noticable glitches (such as loss of session data). We need to continue to improve MediaWiki's ability to handle different storage techniques such as Swift, so that we can expand our media storage, remove upload limits, and prevent the imminent exhaustion of our existing media storage. Our search infrastructure also needs improvement.

Resources

 * Aaron Schulz (80%)
 * Chad Horohoe (40%)
 * Software Security Engineer (40%)
 * Senior Software Engineer (80%)

Activities

 * Notification framework — Add a common framework for storing/sending/reading talk, watch, and other notifications
 * MediaWiki core features for Wikidata
 * Media types on revisions
 * Raw data transclusion
 * Other core architecture work
 * Configuration database - Revamp our configuration management storage - remove global variables, stop proliferation of new ones, provide extensions means of not adding to technical debt, expand unit-testability
 * Media infrastructure - file storage improvements, limitation removal, and maintenance; transcoding support infrastructure
 * Search maintenance and incremental improvements to MediaWiki/Lucene interchange layer.
 * Super-protection
 * Replicated session handling
 * OAuth/OpenID - possible work on AcademicAccess

Q1

 * Notification framework - MediaWiki stock implementation
 * Review media types for pages work from Wikidata
 * Review raw data transclusion work from Wikidata
 * OAuth/OpenID/SAML - initial test implementation for highest value use cases

Q2

 * Notification framework - beginning of Node.js
 * Media infrastructure - file storage improvements, limitation removal, and maintenance; transcoding support infrastructure
 * Search maintenance and incremental improvements to MediaWiki/Lucene interchange layer.
 * OAuth/OpenID/SAML rollout

Q3

 * Search maintenance and incremental improvements to MediaWiki/Lucene interchange layer.
 * Replicated session handling
 * Configuration database - initial implementation
 * Continued identity and authorization support

Q4

 * Continued identity and authorization support
 * Configuration database - CommonSettings/InitializeSettings migrated

MediaWiki development process
Goals/Budget team: RobLa, Erik, Tim, Chad, Antoine, Terry

Goal
Ensure development is efficient, code is deployed rapidly, and volunteer contribution is integrated efficiently.

Rationale
In 2010-11, we only managed one deployment of MediaWiki (1.17) to the cluster, and that deployment took a couple of attempts. In 2011-12, we implemented Heterogeneous Deploy support in our tools, which let us roll out 1.18 and 1.19 in a gradual way. We also switched our version control system from Subversion to Git, and switched our review process to pre-commit reviews. As of this writing, we haven't yet deployed out of Git, but we're already having serious conversations about a bi-weekly deployment process. We also carved out 20% of our overall development capacity for code review and general community-reported bugfixing.

In 2012-13, we need to continue to invest in this area. While we believe that Git represents a net positive for us, there have been significant regressions in productivity from Subversion (such as code review tooling), which need to be addressed. While we made a modest increase in our deployment frequency in the last fiscal year, we get significant value from deploying far more frequently.

We need to do this while also supporting ongoing operational needs of the site and supporting our development and editing communities. We also need to be proactive in training new developers in the best practices for secure software development.

Resources

 * Sam Reed (100%)
 * Chad Horohoe (60%)
 * Software Security Engineer (60%)
 * All engineering staff (20%)

Activities

 * Ongoing activities
 * Continued code maintenance and review of new changes
 * MediaWiki release management and installer maintenance (2 tarball releases per year)
 * Shell bug requests and MediaWiki-specific operations support
 * Support for outside initiatives (e.g. Wikidata)
 * Security bugfixes and emergency releases
 * Large reviews (security, performance, architecture) of new system components
 * Developer training
 * Manage 20% time and other ways to keep code review in check
 * Git and Gerrit
 * Github integration - mirroring to Github, Gitorious and other services, and integrating pull requests into our workflow
 * Usability improvements to get us back to parity with old CodeReview extension
 * Replace "scap" deployment tool
 * Current tool is fragile. Errors get lost in sea of useless warnings, and pushes can leave cluster in inconsistent state.  With far more frequent deployments, we need a far more robust tool.

Outputs and outcomes

 * At least monthly deployments of new MediaWiki revisions
 * Review queue for core and deployed extensions
 * Never exceed 200 completely unreviewed requests, nothing older than a week
 * Make a final decision on all changes, large or small, within a month at most
 * Backlog of no more than 50 open shell bugs at any given time
 * Quarterly security training, along with quality online video material

Q1

 * Mirror to Github, and accept pulls from Github
 * High priority Git/Gerrit usability fixes
 * Evaluation of Git/Gerrit workflow
 * Evaluate Phabricator and other tools as augmenting replacing Gerrit
 * Evaluate gated-trunk model
 * Evaluate branching strategy
 * First security training
 * MediaWiki 1.20
 * Continuous responsibilities: shell bugs, security updates, developer training, high priority bugfixes, code and systems review

Q2

 * Scap replacement (possibly leveraging Git)
 * Additional Git workflow enhancements
 * Second security training
 * Continuous responsibilities: shell bugs, security updates, developer training, high priority bugfixes, code and systems review

Q3

 * Third security training
 * MediaWiki 1.21
 * Continuous responsibilities: shell bugs, security updates, developer training, high priority bugfixes, code and systems review

Q4

 * Fourth security training
 * Continuous responsibilities: shell bugs, security updates, developer training, high priority bugfixes, code and systems review

QA Engineering and Continuous Integration
Goals/Budget team: RobLa, Chris, Tomasz, Alolita, Antoine, MarkH ...

Goal
Our goal with our Quality Assurance activity is to accurately assess the quality of new software (and address major problems) prior to imposing that software on editors and readers of our site.

Rationale
In 2011-12, Wikimedia Foundation established a beginning for quality assurance activities. We hired Chris McMahon as our QA Lead, and brought in Antoine Musso to help with our test automation infrastructure. We also have a Bugmeister who helps prioritize and assign the bugs submitted through our public bug tracker.

We don't believe our current hiring is sufficient. WMF today has 22 full time developers and approximately 20 more part time or contract developers, in addition to a large contingent of volunteer developers. While there is no standard ratio of developers to testers, and that ratio varies widely across the software development landscape, one commonly quoted figure in practice in the industry is three developers to one tester. Unfortunately, we can't afford that luxury, so we're going to have to be very strategic about the hiring we do in this area.

In 2012-13, we plan to dedicate resources to streamlining test automation, rallying community support for test efforts, providing infrastructure for better developer collaboration with testers, and providing burst testing capacity when needed. This all will help ensure that our site remains stable.

This has a significant dependency on our "Wikimedia technical community" efforts to recruit and retain a robust testing community.

Resources

 * Chris McMahon (85%)
 * Antoine Musso (80%)
 * Bugmeister (100%)
 * QA Engineer (100%)
 * Contractor budget

Activities

 * Test automation
 * API
 * Desktop browser-based UI automation (e.g. Selenium, TestSwarm)
 * Mobile automated testing (emulation/on-device)
 * Unit testing/CI/phpUnit/QUnit
 * Public manual test environment
 * Beta Labs
 * Labs instances for feature development
 * Community testing/Crowdsourcing
 * Building volunteer base through tester recruitment, bug bashes, etc (see Wikimedia technical community)
 * Crowdsourcing services
 * Test documentation and management
 * Test plan writing
 * Test plan standards/cleanup and oversight
 * Doc improvements - Install, automated suite docs, labs, etc.
 * Manual testing
 * Supporting the MediaWiki release cycle
 * Cross browser testing
 * Editor engagement features, i18n, Mobile device Core maintenance/misc, multimedia)
 * Manage contractor capacity, especially when burst activity is needed.

Q1

 * Test plan standards established
 * Test plans in all *major* areas of feature development
 * Start of feature testing (Selenium?) automation for both desktop and mobile
 * Unit test sprint

Q2

 * Code coverage metrics
 * Build-out of automated feature testing

Q3

 * Further build-out of automated feature testing
 * Code coverage goals established in Q2

Q4

 * Further build-out of automated feature testing
 * Code coverage goals established in Q2

Interdependencies

 * Volunteer QA Coordinator
 * Bugmeister
 * Possible operational impact from Selenium test automation

Wikimedia technical community
We aim to support volunteers and companies/orgs who work on Wikimedia technology, enable them to achieve more with each other and with WMF, and (when possible) align them with Wikimedia movement goals (especially new editor engagement and the visual editor).

Our volunteer encouragement, mentoring, and alignment “funnels” have holes at different various points for operations, documentation/project management, testing/bug reporting/bug triage (QA), and software development activities. We have a steady stream of new software developers interested in joining MediaWiki development and of new system administrators interested in using Wikimedia Labs. However, we are not as strong at finding or coordinating project management or QA activities, at mentoring the new developers, or providing a compelling and usable development environment in Wikimedia Labs that helps sysadmins and developers more easily write, test, and puppetize their changes. We have also identified the strategic weak points in these processes and aim to strengthen them.

Given that, we aim to reduce our emphasis on initial software development outreach and to improve our mentorship of the existing development community, except in partnering with Global Development and local organizations where we have a strong interest in growing the local Wikimedia community (Brazil and India). We instead aim to support staff and volunteers in mentoring developer volunteers who come in via existing intake processes. And we will partner with QA and with Ops to strengthen our volunteering pipelines in those areas.

The imbalance in our technical community leans strongly towards development and lacks systematic testing. While the QA team and MediaWiki platform developers are going to automate what testing can be automated, there is simply no adequate substitute for trained manual testers to find bugs and assure the quality of our service. Since we cannot afford to hire many testers, we are choosing to hire a volunteer QA coordinator to train and lead unpaid testers as a key strategy of our QA efforts.

Goals/Budget team: Sumana, RobLa, Tomasz, Alolita, Guillaume

Rationale
With more and better focused technical volunteers, we can do more work towards Wikimedia movement goals.

Resources

 * Sumana Harihareswara: 100% as volunteer development coordinator
 * Bugmeister: 50%
 * Guillaume Paumier: 100% as Technical Communications Manager
 * Technical event marketer: 100%
 * Volunteer QA Coordinator: 100%

Activities

 * General engineering communications, infrastructure and mentorship
 * Technical communication from engineering
 * Patch review, extensions review, and code review facilitation
 * Mentorship/training programs (UCOSP], [[GSoC)
 * Process/product improvements in Git workflow and Labs environment
 * Events
 * In-person developer outreach events (tutorials)
 * In-person developer inreach events (expert collaboration)
 * Encouraging small regional events
 * QA support
 * Bug squad formation and leadership
 * QA training
 * MediaWiki documentation
 * Strategic collaboration with other large orgs and communities; developer engagement/evangelism
 * Teaching/leading interested nontechnical activists to do product management work

Outputs & outcomes

 * Software development volunteering
 * Currently: Software developers can contribute but sometimes wait for weeks or months before seeing their changes merged; new volunteers don't get aligned to movement priorities.
 * Goal: Facilitate the intake and growth of volunteer developers and their ability to contribute software, and align them to the movement priorities. All new changesets from volunteers get an initial comment within one week of the merge request.


 * Ops volunteering
 * Currently: We have very few volunteers who can lead system administration projects or contribute to ops.
 * Goal: Many people can puppetize packages, and do so. They don’t need to whine as much to get things done.


 * Engineering project documentation and product management volunteering
 * Currently: A few volunteers make occasional edits to update project documentation, or make efforts to write specs, gather feature requirements, or do other product management work.
 * Goal: There is a team of on-call documenters, and multiple volunteers reliably update documentation about projects they care about. At least one volunteer consistently contributes to product management work.


 * MediaWiki documentation volunteering
 * Currently: sparse, uncoordinated documentation on the MediaWiki software, with occasional uncoordinated updates
 * Goal: a team of on-call MediaWiki documenters who can sprint on specific areas, and up-to-date documentation for the MediaWiki API and for the extensions that Wikimedia Foundation deploys


 * QA volunteering
 * Currently: many people find bugs and report bugs, but we have no systematic volunteer testing and nearly no systematic bug triage by volunteers.
 * Goal: A test squad of good testers whom we can call upon to test at particular moments or on particular components/tools and provide good bug reports, so we can do strategic outreach, and a bug squad of good bug triageurs who continuously triage bugs. Ongoing training to improve testers' and triageurs' skills.

Timeline
(when will major milestones of this project be hit, with focus on the 2012-13 fiscal year)


 * Q1 (Jul-Sep)
 * Continuing responsibilities


 * Q2 (Oct-Dec)
 * Continuing responsibilities


 * Q3 (Jan-Mar)


 * Q4 (Apr-Jun)


 * TO ADD: events; mentorship programs; monthly reports; outreach moments; milestones in trainings, online events, etc.


 * TO ADD: some kind of mass outreach/focused outreach to potential testers

Interdependencies

 * Ryan Lane as Wikimedia Labs technical lead and Platform Engineering's DevOps Program Manager: assistance in Labs
 * QA Lead and Volunteer QA Coordinator: assistance in QA
 * Platform Engineering: assistance with Git/Gerrit/developer platform and workflow
 * Chris McMahon as QA Lead