Requests for comment/Phabricator

Problem
The Wikimedia technical community is currently using plenty of different tools for tracking bugs / product management / project management / todo lists. Some are open-source and others are proprietary, some are self-hosted and others are hosted by third parties, and all in all the multitude of tools and channels makes it difficult for both staff and volunteers to keep track of what's happening. They also all have their own limitations, and the multitude of scattered tools involved in the development chain is cumbersome both for current and prospective contributors. Members of the development and user communities have expressed frustration due to the current state and wish to consolidate the development toolchain.

See the full email thread for more background.

Background
This is what has been done so far: The goal of this RfC is to come to an agreement as a community on a smaller set of tools that teams would agree upon, which would make collaboration and maintenance easier. Ideally, this would also be an opportunity to use tools that are better aligned with the values of our movement, and better integrated with each other.
 * People have shared their needs and workflows.
 * Andre and Guillaume have summarized all of that into consolidated requirements.
 * Andre and Guillaume have set up a list of options to solve our problem, based on what was mentioned during preliminary discussions.
 * People have discussed the options and eliminated some of them in preparation for the RfC.
 * Besides the wiki, communication has happened mainly on the teampractices list, with updates also sent to wikitech-l.
 * We're now drafting this RfC and welcoming edits on both the form and the content.

Proposal: Move to Phabricator
This proposal consists of replacing several of our tools by one consolidated tool. Phabricator will replace gitblit, Gerrit, Jenkins, Bugzilla, RT, Trello and Mingle. This means you'll only need one account for everything, and all tasks / bugs / commits / screenshots will be cross-referenced automatically. Development teams will be free to use other tools (like Trello, Mingle, etc.) but Phabricator will be the one supported by the WMF.

You can test Phabricator in Labs. This is an actual test instance so don't be afraid to break things.

If this proposal fails to gather agreement, we will keep the status quo. The status quo is somewhat working at the moment, so if there isn't a better alternative we can decide to keep what we have now and reevaluate every year. We may want to consider consolidating our project management tools later into Scrumbugz (a tool that works on top of Bugzilla) but that will be a separate discussion.

You're welcome to contribute to the developing FAQ and browse the Wikimedia Phabricator project in our test instance, which we're using to identify missing features and plan the possible migration.

In favor of Phabricator

 * But migration of existing content (including closed bugs, etc.) is critical. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 00:24, 15 April 2014 (UTC)
 * --JEissfeldt (WMF) (talk) 01:06, 15 April 2014 (UTC) agree both with the proposal and the critical content point made by James
 * +1 to what James said. BZ data must be migrated. ^demon[omg plz] 16:40, 15 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Support as long as teams can still user third party tools like Trello as necessary Tfinc (talk) 00:20, 17 April 2014 (UTC)
 * The idea of having developers, designers, product managers, and just any volunteer using one tool with their Wikimedia credentials is worth fighting for. The migration will be complex, but we are planning for it. Phabricator is coded in PHP, a language that MediaWiki developers are familiar with, and the upstream project takes feedback and patches.--Qgil (talk) 15:50, 17 April 2014 (UTC)
 * I imagine there will be a lot of "ZOMG my favorite feature of X isn't here" but I think having issues and code review and planning all in one pile would be worth the pain of learning a new set of tools. BDavis (WMF) (talk) 17:12, 17 April 2014 (UTC)
 * I think it will be worth the effort. Grunny  ( talk ) 18:03, 17 April 2014 (UTC)
 * I am in favor of trying out Phabricator for a few select projects so we get a better idea of what moving over all projects would mean --Jeroen De Dauw (talk) 19:09, 17 April 2014 (UTC)

Basically neutral

 * Personally, with the current test installation (microscopic fonts, functions hidden behind unlabeled icons, other icons not clickable, tendency to feature bloat, some features like voting missing, other features like Gerrit and GitHub integration not testable at the moment) I can't decide if it's worth my time. It could be the greatest thing on earth or turn into a bottomless pit. A project that starts with "We can't manage 12 tools! We need to do something!" could also end with "Now we have 13 tools." --Thiemo Mättig (WMDE) 14:14, 17 April 2014 (UTC)