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

Wed Mar 12 23:59:17 UTC 2014

On 12 March 2014 16:54, Arthur Richards <arichards at wikimedia.org> wrote:

>
>
> On Wed, Mar 12, 2014 at 4:42 PM, Oliver Keyes <okeyes at wikimedia.org>wrote:
>>
>> The objection is pretty self-explanatory; agile is a philosophy that
>> dictates putting things we strongly suspect, or even know, to be actively
>> buggy, in front of users. When doing so includes replacing or superseding
>> core functionality and either forcing or strongly suggesting that users
>> should use the buggy replacement, users get, ah, pissed. Users like things
>> that work, and when you replace something that works with something that
>> doesn't while insisting it'll totally be more usable at some undefined
>> point in the future we can't pin down because we don't actually know in
>> detail what we'll be doing more than 2 weeks in advance, they start to
>> wonder very loudly at our competence.
>>
>>
>
> I understand your description of the objection and that some users are
> intolerant of the degree to which we break things. However, I think this is
> a mischaracterization of agile philosophy, or at least is an interpretation
> of the agile manifesto [1]/agile principles [2] that I don't agree with. It
> is still possible to create thoroughly tested/QA'd software with minimal
> bugs and do it while embracing an agile mindset. I think that we as an
> engineering organization place a higher priority on getting experiments and
> features in front of our users than we do on polish, but that is not
> because to do so is necessarily agile.
>

Sure. But if you're an average user, you don't see the development
philosophy behind what's changing in the site you rely on 9 times out of
10. When you do, it's because you're on a site that prioritises
transparency, like ours. IOW, I wouldn't be shocked to find that most users
involved even tangentially in our development processes, as consumers
rather than devs, assume that this is just How Agile Works, because most
dev teams don't expose their processes.

> Still, I would like to know where the conversation is happening more
> broadly in the community so I can better understand it and engage in it.
>

I would thoroughly recommend
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:VisualEditor and the archives
thereof as an example of where we prioritised moving over polish (not
trying to offend anyone; we all actually sat down and concluded that we'd
moved too fast ;)). Sherry undoubtedly has other recommendations

>
> [1] http://agilemanifesto.org/
> [2] http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html
> --
> Arthur Richards
> Software Engineer, Mobile
> [[User:Awjrichards]]
> IRC: awjr
> +1-415-839-6885 x6687
>

-- 
Oliver Keyes
Product Analyst
Wikimedia Foundation
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