[teampractices] [Engineering] Feedback requested on proposal for creation of Agile Specialist Group

Tue Mar 4 06:23:12 UTC 2014

On Mon, Mar 3, 2014 at 8:00 PM, Whatamidoing (WMF)/Sherry Snyder
<ssnyder at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> (2)  Did you all know that a significant proportion of our user community is
> unhappy with the way that Agile affects them?  "Release early, release
> often" from the user's perspective means "have horribly and/or newly busted
> stuff screw up your work twice a week."

:-)

I think there's two responses to that:

1) Use of programs like BetaFeatures. I don't think anyone's
complained that we're pushing out updates to multimedia viewer pretty
continuously while it's in Beta, for example. For a feature that's
still new and under heavy development, this helps us get feedback from
early adopters and testers that influences the shape of the product
without being disruptive to the entire site. It's neither a novel nor
revolutionary idea, but it works pretty well. We need to expand that
toolkit as appropriate (e.g. release to % of audience, more split
tests, more calls-to-action, etc.).

2) We do have a higher tolerance for breaking things than, say, a
banking website. We do very complex, challenging and ambitious things,
and in order to learn what works and what doesn't, we have to try &
learn quickly in a real-world setting. That _will_ disrupt some users'
workflows some of the time, and that's the price we pay for doing what
we need to do - there's really no alternative other than "make fewer
changes" (which, say, banking websites typically do). Making bigger
changes and waiting longer to release just leads to massive pain
delivered in longer intervals as opposed to smaller pain delivered
continuously. :) We've seen this in the past when we had 6 month+
release cycles.

Erik

-- 
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation