[teampractices] Phabricator for monthly and quarterly reports

Tue Feb 3 17:04:04 UTC 2015

Hallo,

Continuing the theme of my previous post about using Phabricator for
roadmap planning - how can Phabricator be used more efficiently for monthly
and quarterly reports?

These are currently written manually as wiki pages and Google
presentations. It is by definition about the past, so there's not much
chance that it will go out of sync, but it could be more efficient.

For monthly engineering reports I go over resolved tasks in Phabricator and
merged commits in Gerrit, and I summarize the important things that were
done in the features that my team develops and maintains. If I try to
imagine how this could become more efficient, then instead of typing the
summary lines manually, I'd love to see a list of all relevant tasks and
commits with a "Include in monthly report" button next to each, and this
would generate the report, or at least an initial version of it. It might
be a "faster horse", however, and you could imagine something much better.

For quarterly reviews I can't see how we can escape the slides, but maybe
we could have smarter stored queries in Phabricator that would help
gathering the info for the slides. Some quick things that I can imagine:
* Number of bugs created and resolved by team members (or each team member)
during the quarter.
* Dividing this into planned sprint tasks and unplanned tasks would be
quite useful.
* Another relevant division would be to who reported the bugs - members of
the team, members of other teams, non-WMF people.
* Finally, which of these were in the features directly developed by the
team, and which were done as support to other teams (for example, Language
Engineering team more or less officially develops ContentTranslation, ULS
and Translate, and when needed, it also supports the internationalization
of VisualEditor, MobileFrontend, core i18n classes, etc.)

Doing the above will probably require more diligent use of Phabricator tags
- not just projects, but also teams (Language, Mobile, etc.) and topics
(security, i18n, etc.).

These are the main things that are relevant to my team; other teams may
have different needs.

Thanks for your input!

--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
‪“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬
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