[teampractices] Bugzilla migration Re: Project management tools review: Regressions/tradeoffs; migration

Wed Mar 26 20:38:14 UTC 2014

On Wed, Mar 26, 2014 at 1:18 PM, Rob Lanphier <robla at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> Chad points out that we can start a fresh instance of Phabricator with
> T100000, which would give us plenty of headway to import Bugzilla tickets 1
> through 67000 or so at a later date.  Given how complicated a
> Bugzilla->Phabrcator migration will be, I would much prefer a strategy that
> doesn't insist on making that move on day one.

I'd also like to suggest a somewhat radical alternative, which is not
automatically importing any Bugzilla items in to Phabricator. Let me
explain the steps here and what I think the advantages would be:

   1. We set up Phabricator. All new issues should appear there, and we
   direct users to do so. (Assuming we still want users directly reporting in
   to Phabricator).
   2. Bugzilla is set to read-only mode except for admins.
   3. We hold a big party in SF and with remote participation over Hangout
   on Air + IRC, where all teams participate and as a group we import tickets
   from Bugzilla they actually think are relevant. I think we should/could
   encourage this to be more intensive, like true all-night weekend hackathons
   with food, beer, and cool swag (t-shirt: "I survived the Bugzilla migration
   of 2014.")
   4. Read-only mode of Bugzilla is made available indefinitely as a
   history record.

This is a lot of work for big products like VisualEditor and core, but I
think it has some potentially really positive attributes, including:

   - Forces us to prioritize and clear out bugs that we don't fully
   understand/don't think are actionable
   - Gives us a clean break with Bugzilla, where data from that platform
   may be out of date or irrelevant (like keywords).
   - Gets all team members at WMF and hopefully more community members to
   understand their open task list better. This is instead of saddling poor
   Andre and the product managers or tech leads with all the work.
   - Trains community members and staff to use Phabricator task management,
   by throwing them in the deep end of the pool
   - If we have teams responsible for importing the bugs from their
   backlog, the size of the backlog will be proportional to the size of the
   team. We can supplement this with voluntary signup lists to help out on
   certain components from Bugzilla.

-- 
Steven Walling,
Product Manager
https://wikimediafoundation.org/
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