[teampractices] "Maintenance" vs "New work"

Fri Aug 7 20:14:53 UTC 2015

<quote name="Kevin Smith" date="2015-08-07" time="12:41:01 -0700">
> On Fri, Aug 7, 2015 at 12:17 PM, James Forrester <jforrester at wikimedia.org>
> wrote:
> 
> > On 7 August 2015 at 11:57, Kevin Smith <ksmith at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> >
> >> And (and this is the main point of this email), for most software
> >> development teams, "keep the lights on" should be near zero, right? So
> >> effectively most of the teams we work with would mostly need to track 2
> >> buckets (maintenance and new features), and if the third bucket is
> >> substantial, that would indicate a problem.
> >>
> >> Sure, but WMF doesn't have "software development teams" in this language
> > (except in the case of the mobile apps teams). We have teams responsible
> > for supporting software as used on a particular cluster/site. Running the
> > site – be it unplanned fixes or scheduled maintenance –  is absolutely the
> > most important thing we do, and a very significant part of our workload.
> >
> >
> It would be interesting to get the percentages from different teams. My
> perception (could be wrong) is that Discovery does almost nothing to "keep
> the lights on" (that is, keep the site running assuming nothing
> interferes). And I would guess (wild hand-wavey guess) that "maintenance"
> might be something like 10 or 20% of their time. As an aside, the team is
> actively trying to streamline the time/effort that restarts take, to reduce
> that maintenance burden.

I think the Discovery team could be much more easily categorized in with
the mobile apps teams vs in with Editing or any team in Infrastructure
:)

Which is why, I believe, James said that "keep the lights on" is
actually a very significant part of his team's workload.

Greg

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