[teampractices] Addition to Scrum of Scrums?

Tue Dec 3 20:19:51 UTC 2013

On 12/03/2013 11:43 AM, Steven Walling wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Dec 3, 2013 at 11:41 AM, Toby Negrin <tnegrin at wikimedia.org
> <mailto:tnegrin at wikimedia.org>> wrote:
> 
>     Feels like Engineering Community should represent these stakeholders.
> 
> 
> Seems wise to me.
> 
> Quim?

I don't think this problem is about volunteers missing stakeholders, but
about patches missing reviewers. ECT doesn't have the skills or the
permissions to review and merge patches.

In an awful world, ECT could provide an ugly patch to this problem by
nagging professional developers regularly so they pay more attention to
the work contributed by volunteer developers. However, the root of the
problem would still exist: teams of mainly professional maintainers not
finding time for / not giving priority to contributions coming from
outside of the team. A deep problem in any open source software project.

What ECT is doing to help solving this problem is to work on metrics
that will answer these questions:

How long is the Gerrit review queue over time? How long does it take to
review code contributions? Are we improving? Are Wikimedia staff and
non-staff contributions processed equally? Who is doing better and worse?

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Community_metrics#Gerrit_review_queue

Hopefully in a few weeks we will know better whether this problem is
anecdotal or serious, and whether it happens in all teams/components or
in some more than in others.

Then we will see whether something can and should be improved in our
team practices.

-- 
Quim Gil
Technical Contributor Coordinator @ Wikimedia Foundation
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil