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

Tue Mar 4 23:43:33 UTC 2014

On 03/03/2014 11:00 PM, Whatamidoing (WMF)/Sherry Snyder 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."  Among a
> certain (vocal) subset of the community, this proposal will be
> understood as "spend lots of money to continue screwing up, instead of
> hiring someone to fix the bugs before we users ever see them".

The full saying is, "Release early. Release often. And listen to your 
customers." 
(http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s04.html). 
  'Customer' isn't exactly the right word here, but the 'listen' is 
still critical.

If we just develop things in isolation, then release to production 
rarely, two things will happen:

1. Users will not be able to provide feedback until we've gone too far 
down the wrong path.  By releasing early and often, we get prompt 
feedback and can steer more quickly.

2. Sometimes, more bugs will pile up at those release points (since they 
did not appear/were not noticed in earlier testing, or *could not* 
appear in low-load or non-production environments)

We are working to provide more of a ramp for features (e.g. with feature 
flags and Beta Features), but I don't think we should move to a slow 
release cycle.

Matt Flaschen