Talk:Project management tools/Review/Options

Other criteria
Possible other criteria : guillom 11:56, 24 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Cost: difficult to assess. Hosted tools for which we pay a fee are easy, but self-hosted tools that we need to maintain also have a cost. Tools scattered across the Wikimultiverse also have a cost.
 * Programming language: For FOSS tools, the language(s) they use will influence our ability to fix / tweak / expand functionality to serve our needs.


 * I've added the languages I could figure out. guillom 13:20, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

Fulcrum
This one looks kinda interesting from the screenshots at least. This might be worth setting up a test instance for. Has anyone seen this in action? -- RobLa-WMF (talk) 05:37, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

Scrumbugz
This one has all of the outward appearances of a poor choice. It's difficult to evaluate the user interface based on the website, and the project hasn't seen a commit in four months. I somehow doubt that's because they're "done". :-) Does anyone find this option at all interesting? -- RobLa-WMF (talk) 16:31, 4 March 2014 (UTC)


 * I think it was just mentioned in passing on the list. I don't think it's viable either. Will remove. Steven Walling (WMF) &bull; talk   17:36, 4 March 2014 (UTC)


 * AFAIK, Wikimedia Germany is currently experimenting with Scrumbugz, so they hopefully should be able to comment on it. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 19:10, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

iceScrum
This is FOSS but is ugly as sin. We could do better. Steven Walling (WMF) &bull; talk   17:37, 4 March 2014 (UTC)
 * It's also partly proprietary. As noted in the table, they have an "iceScrum Pro", which includes many key features (e.g. connecting commits and issues, continuous integration, LDAP).  The very fact of the Pro separation means the community is divided, and there's an inherent tension.  E.g. if we implemented linking commits and issues in the open source version, would they accept it to merge upstream? Superm401 - Talk 05:33, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

GitHub
While I've expressed interest in Phabricator for having enjoyed working with it in the past, I didn't realize that GitHub covered our needs in terms of continuous integration, etc. With that in mind, and since working with GitHub on open source projects has always been a pleasant experience, I think that GitHub has an undeniable advantage: we would have more 3rd-party contributions on GitHub than we would with any solution we host ourselves.--GDubuc (WMF) (talk) 08:49, 4 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Operations is not likely to be excited about deploying to the prod cluster from a repository that is not entirely under our control. I talked to GitHub a couple of years ago about auditability of their hosting and was told that the SaaS hosted version did not support security audits. They recommended their "Enterprise" product which is a VM image that is hosted internally by an implementing organization. GitHub being non-free (libre) seems like a large drawback. When we find things that don't work well for us there (when, not if), we will be at the mercy of the GitHub team to correct the problems. --BDavis (WMF) (talk) 15:58, 4 March 2014 (UTC)

I think GitHub should be out of scope for this conversation. It doesn't really address the project management issue, and its issue tracker requires a non-WMF account. It *might* be ok to ask our developers to sign up for an account on an outside service, but asking site readers and editors to sign up for a GitHub account to file a bug is a non-starter. Whether we use it for repo management is a separate conversation (probably still not likely, but a more interesting conversation nonetheless). -- RobLa-WMF (talk) 16:19, 4 March 2014 (UTC)


 * I agree that this is a non-starter; I think that we should use it as a benchmark for comparison, rather than evaluate it as an actual target for use. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 18:17, 4 March 2014 (UTC)
 * What James said. Legoktm (talk) 18:04, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

Phabricator
I think that in terms of FOSS solution, this is as good as it gets at the moment. I'd lean towards Phabricator over GitLab because the foundation has much more PHP expertise than Rails. After all the foundation could have improved gerrit to make it more tolerable, but didn't, probably because of unfamiliarity with Java. We would definitely have to contribute code to Phabricator, because some features in beta need improvement, but their team is very helpful and responsive to contributions. Taken as-is, though, it's definitely much more basic and rougher around the edges than GitHub for some features.--GDubuc (WMF) (talk) 09:00, 4 March 2014 (UTC)
 * +1 to this. After seeing how far Phabricator has come in the past couple of years, I'm pretty excited about it.  Regardless of whether we migrate to it for repo management, it would seem to work well as an issue tracker.  The project management tools are still a bit basic, but seem to be heading in the right direction, and I think we can realistically expect that they will be solid in a year or two (especially if we help them along).  Of the FOSS options out there, this seems the most viable. -- RobLa-WMF (talk) 16:10, 4 March 2014 (UTC)

As Gilles has mentioned, this is really the standout solution at this point. While GitHub vastly outperforms all others in its ability to give us global reach to the open-source community, it does not give us any sort of reasonable project management options for products of our scale. I can see our people making many additions to Phabricator, as there is quite a bit that we could still improve on; but hey, that's where this whole FOSS thing becomes useful. As-is, it does suit our needs, and it will definitely speed up my team's development process. In addition, it makes cross-team changes more visible, and more manageable.

But most importantly: it really makes the process of reviewing code simple and painless, and actually lets you have local git revision history for changesets! This is huge compared to the inane mess that is git review, which requires you to repeatedly amend. Being able to easily apply patches for testing, revert, squash, and merge is a particularly useful feature of this software stack. SG (talk) 09:33, 5 March 2014 (UTC)
 * This means you can have more than one commit in a changeset (ala GitHub pull requests)? I agree that would be quite nice. Superm401 - Talk 05:46, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

I've played with Phabricator for about 5 minutes and like it better than gerrit. The only thing I don't like about it is that it seems to require a login before you can view anything? I'm assuming that's a configuration setting we can not set, but it is annoying that to view a bug in Phabricator itself, I need to create an account on their site. Legoktm (talk) 18:08, 5 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Yeah, I don't get why it requires accounts for views (oddly, when I went to retest this, it no longer required me to login, but maybe I was looking at a different page type). Anyway, this should be relatively simple to fix and/or configure. Superm401 - Talk 05:46, 6 March 2014 (UTC)