Wikimedia Engineering/2014-15 Goals

Purpose of this document: Goals for the Wikimedia Engineering and Product Development department, fiscal year 2014–15 (July 1, 2014 – June 30, 2015). The goalsetting process owner in each section is the person responsible for coordinating completion of the section, in partnership with the team and relevant stakeholders.

These goals will be iterated on a quarterly basis. Each quarter, the top priorities for the department as a whole will be elucidated and highlighted.

Top departmental priorities for Q4 (April-June 2015)
Note: The top priorities live on a subpage, but are dynamically loaded below - the content is identical and automatically updated in both places.

Site Operations and Site Architecture
Goalsetting process owner: Mark Bergsma

Interdependencies:
 * Assist other teams in Q3 on:
 * Deployments of RESTbase, Wikidata Query Service, HHVM image scalers, Hierator

Wikimedia Labs
Goalsetting process owner: Mark Bergsma

Interdependencies:
 * Assist other teams in Q3 on:
 * Beta Labs improvements (RelEng)
 * Assist other teams in Q4 on:
 * Isolated CI instances (RelEng)

Dependencies:
 * Improvements to the Labs management web interface (MediaWiki OpenStack manager or possibly Horizon) will need involvement from the UX group, and potentially development assistent from a (MediaWiki?) development team.

Editing Department
Overall goal-setting process owner: Trevor Parscal

Context: We build collaborative, inclusive tools for creating and editing free knowledge.

Language Engineering
Goalsetting process owner: Amir Aharoni

Draft: Wikimedia Language engineering/Roadmap 2014-15

Multimedia Team
Goal-setting process owner: James Forrester

Collaboration Team
Goalsetting process owner: Danny Horn

Interdependencies:
 * Mobile web – Jon Robson joining the Flow team for Q1
 * Visual Editor and Multimedia for the Mini-VE and Media Uploader
 * Mobile apps – Connecting probably in Q3

Parsing Team
Goalsetting process owner: Subbu Sastry

See this page for additional details. Besides these high level goals, we will continue to focus on bug fixing, supporting existing Parsoid clients, improving performance, and regular deploys.

Interdependencies


 * Rashomon / Content API is needed for html page views, stable element ids, efficient template updates.
 * VE, Flow, Mobile depend on Parsoid output
 * i18n consultation for language variant support
 * Content translation group on stable ids
 * Collaboration / interaction with editors community for wikilint/linttrap
 * Wikidata for content widgets

VisualEditor Team
Goal-setting process owner: James Forrester

The VisualEditor ''Team is working to make VisualEditor a great editor for new and experienced editors alike, focusing on improving the performance and usability whilst adding some more features to make VisualEditor more helpful, intuitive and practical for use for every content edit, alongside maintaining, improving, and extending the existing editor software. Below are a set of goals that we hope to achieve over the next financial year (July 2014 – June 2015), with a balance of optimistic and pessimistic assumptions about speed of delivery; not all goals may be achieved in the time period indicated, and some may be updated over time.''

On-going work happening every quarter:
 * Stability and bug fixing, prioritising any bugs that cause wikitext corruption or any other form of disruption for our wikis’ communities (including in the wikitext editor);
 * Performance improvements for users, tracking load & save times, execution speed;
 * UX improvements tracked regularly and reported in a quarterly public user testing narrative;
 * Ensuring the success of VisualEditor on mobile, with a target of feature equivalence on tablet and at least some features on phone, with responsibility for both VisualEditor and wikitext editing pipelines on tablets and phones as well as desktop transitioning from Mobile to the team; and
 * Collaborating with volunteers and other Engineering teams like Parsoid, Services, Platform, & Core on related efforts like skin improvements, front-end performance, and other areas.

Interdependencies: Likely delayed until FY 2015/16:
 * Auto-filling citations depends on the Outreach Program for Women work to do this led by the Services team (and partially mentored by the Editing team).
 * Uploading media functionality relies on work planned to be done in the Multimedia team.
 * Language variants support relies entirely on work planned to be done in the Parsoid team.
 * Continued key on-going dependencies on the Parsoid, Services, Platform Core MediaWiki and Mobile teams, and collaboration with the Core Features and Growth teams for their VisualEditor-related goals.
 * Deployment: Engaging with non-Wikipedias to consider issues for them like which key extensions and gadgets will need VisualEditor support
 * Feature: Uploading media – uploading an image/video/etc. to Commons mid-edit via a button in the toolbar, inserting into the edited page on completion
 * Feature: Rich gallery editing and creation support

MediaWiki Core
Goalsetting process owner: Bryan Davis

Interdependencies:
 * SPDY – TechOps
 * SOA Auth – Services
 * API discoverability improvements – ECT

Release Engineering
Goalsetting process owner: Greg Grossmeier

Interdependencies: Ops, MW Core

Engineering Community
Goalsetting process owner: Quim Gil

Our quarterly goals are defined according to our main drivers for 2014-15:
 * A sane developer experience
 * One development platform
 * Engage with established technical communities
 * Better quality in outreach programs

Interdependencies: Analytics (API data usage, Developer Hub), Design (Developer Hub, mediawiki.org), Global Education Program (Engaging Communities), Grantmaking (Engaging Communities), Platform (Phabricator, Developer Hub), Product (Phabricator), Technical Operations (Phabricator), Zero (Engaging communities).

Availability
Goalsetting process owner: Aaron Schulz

Performance
Goalsetting process owner: Ori Livneh

Security
Goalsetting process owner: Chris Steipp

Mobile Web
Goalsetting process owner: Jon Katz

This fiscal year, the Mobile Apps team will be focused on getting data on feature usage of the new native mobile applications for iOS and Android in order to set goals and prioritize work on new apps features.

The Mobile Web team will split their time between two main focus areas:

Technical enablement – ensuring that other teams can work with MobileFrontend code, standardizing UI and code across desktop and mobile, and helping other teams design and build features that are responsive and work cross-platform.

Product work – this encompasses both a) porting select desktop experiences to tablets and handsets; and b) creating new features and contribution streams that help raise the number of new mobile users who hit the active editor threshold (5+ edits per month; below, referred to as new mobile active editors), so that we not only acquire but retain a healthy new editor population via mobile apps and web.

Our quantitative targets are based on the Growth team's editor model and focus on acquisition (getting more users to register for accounts via mobile), activation (getting more newly registered users to make 5+ edits in their first month), and retention (retaining new mobile active editors for 2+ months post registration). Note: targets for acquisition may change based on ongoing data collection around total edit numbers on tablets; if we observe a sustained drop in total contributions post tablet redirect, we may prioritize work on anonymous editing on mobile, which may change the number of signups on mobile.

Interdependencies:

Editing team: We'll be working with the Editing team throughout the year to create a standardized editing experience (both wikitext and VisualEditor) across devices.

Flow: A MobileFrontend engineer with be embedded with the Flow team throughout Q1 to help build a mobile-first Flow experience.

Research & Data and User experience: We will be doing more in-person qualitative testing of new and existing mobile features to ensure good usability and a high-quality user experience. We will also run controlled tests and gather quantitative data on features to determine their effects on new and active editor numbers.

Analytics: We will need help from Analytics to continue monitoring and analyzing pageview traffic to determine the flow of readership to the desktop and mobile sites of all our projects.

Growth: Some of the mobile-specific contribution experiments planned for this year may dovetail with Growth experiments. Because we will be focusing on the same set of metrics/targets, the Growth and Mobile team should be working closely and sharing product thinking, experimental setup and overall strategy.

Mobile Apps
Goalsetting process owner: Jon Katz

Reading Infrastructure
Goalsetting process owner: Bryan Davis

Discovery
We build the anonymous path of discovery to a trusted and relevant source of knowledge.

Our focus will be on building on-top of our anonymous and trusted search stack to improve relevancy, expose additional content and leverage locally relevant knowledge.

Search
Goalsetting process owner: Dan Garry

Wikidata Query Service
Goalsetting process owner: Dan Garry

Maps & Geo
The Maps & Geo team will be a new team at the Wikimedia Foundation tasked with scaling our existing mapping resources to enable the world to visualize Wikipedia all around them. They will start the year forming the team, inventorying existing work, and scale our tile services and osm db to be production ready. Next they'll work with the Mobile Web and App team to empower our users to use mapping resources.

Goalsetting process owner: Max Semenik

Design – User Experience
Goalsetting process owner: (Previously Jared Zimmerman) Mun May Tee (UI Standardization, Living Style Guide)

Design — Research
Goalsetting process owner: Abbey Ripstra



Services
Goalsetting process owner: Gabriel Wicke

The team's focus is on modularizing our technical infrastructure and enabling other teams by developing internal services and a high-performance external REST API.

Analytics
Goalsetting process owner: Kevin Leduc

Interdependencies:
 * Technical Operations: we work closely with operations, particularly on the Hadoop buildout
 * Research and Data: we depend on this team to provide definitions for metrics we need to collect and graph
 * Foundation: we need input from our many stakeholders to ensure we are producing the correct data and research
 * Design: we need design to help us build useful interfaces to our data

Research and Data
Goalsetting process owner: Dario Taraborelli

Full description: Analytics/Research and Data/2014-15 Goals

Interdependencies:
 * Technical Operations: we work closely with operations to support our databases
 * Analytics: we depend on this team to build out collection and visualization systems for key metrics
 * Product: we need to be closely aligned with product so we can support new initiatives with research and data
 * Foundation: we need input from our many stakeholders to ensure we are producing the correct data and research

Fundraising Engineering
Goalsetting process owner: Anne Gomez

Interdependencies:

Wikipedia Zero
Goalsetting process owner: Carolynne Schloeder

Interdependencies:

Community Engagement (Product)
Goalsetting process owner: Rachel diCerbo
 * The Community Liaisons team, as of February, reports into the broader Community Engagement Dept. Team name change is pending.

Interdependencies:
 * Product Teams which we are already collaborating with will be supported through their life cycle
 * Mobile development will be supported as the year progresses; exact dates TBD

Team Practices Group
Goalsetting process owner: Arthur Richards

Annual goals:
 * 1) Facilitate the achievement of 80% of the goals by teams receiving dedicated resourcing and/or undergoing multi-day workshops with the Team Practices Group
 * 2) Establish a mechanism to transparently and iteratively measure engineering team health

Ongoing work across all quarters: support teams in process/practice improvements, driven by health-check survey results. See also the Complete list of work for the Team Practices Group.

The success of this team will be determined by the success of the teams that leverage TPG's services. A guiding belief of TPG is that healthy teams build better products. It is the TPG's assumption that by supporting WMF engineering teams in becoming healthier and more sustainable, WMF engineering will be more successful as a whole. In addition to qualitative feedback, we can measure the TPG's impact by the success achieved by the individual teams engaged with the TPG - as measured by those teams meeting, or coming close to meeting, their goals. Further, the TPG can begin to validate its assumptions about team health impacting sustainability and product quality by first establishing a mechanism to measure and evaluate engineering team health.

Strategic Research
Goalsetting process owner: Tilman Bayer / Erik Moeller

Editor Engagement – Growth
Goalsetting process owner: Steven Walling

More details at: Growth/2014-15 Goals

Interdependencies:
 * Research &amp; Data and User Experience: Both of these teams are core dependencies for Growth. Currently, the Research and Data embeds a full-time research scientist (Aaron Halfaker), and in order to support continued A/B testing capacity this will continue to be a key need on the team. Additionally, User Experience embeds a primary and secondary design on the team (currently Moiz Syed and Kaity Hammerstein).
 * Analytics: First and foremost, Growth depends on Analytics development for continued support of EventLogging, Wikimetrics, and analytics slave databases. In addition, Growth plans to use planned data products built by Analytics, such as an interest graph, to better attract new editors.
 * Community Engagement (Product): The Community Engagement group did not provide support for Growth during the 2013–14 fiscal year. We think providing some form of dedicated community liason will be critical if the team is to tackle more contentious areas of the user experience, such as article creation. Currently Product (Steven Walling) is filling this role on an as-needed basis, which puts the team primarily in a reactive mode, rather than having a proactive outreach plan.
 * Team Practices Group: The Growth team is small but is relatively inexperienced with Agile practices, and the new team practices group could provide extremely valuable support. Growth has implemented some Scrum practices, but its capacity for process improvement is limited since the team has never had a dedicated scrum master.
 * Mobile Web: There is close alignment this coming year with the goals of the Mobile Web team and Growth. Mobile wants to spread its knowledge about mobile-first product development and engineering, while Growth wants to help develop mobile versions of its products.
 * Mobile Apps: As we introduce login, editing, and other contributory workflows to our native apps, Growth should work closely with the Apps team to make sure there is consistent experience, discover ways to integrate its findings in to the apps, and consider methods for attracting apps users to desktop products.