https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Developer_Summit_2015#Schedule
Tuesday 27, 9:00am
The existing ways of releasing user-facing features have proved to have severe limitations during the Media Viewer release. As someone who went through that storm, I feel like many of the organizational issues we encountered haven't been addressed yet. This is a critical issue, as years of hard work can potentially get a very hostile response when the release date comes, and unprepared engineers can find themselves with a big crisis to handle with many hotfixes to produce in a short period of time.
While some areas have been improved since, such as the introduction of the design research team as a way to validate changes, much still has to be discussed. Here are some ideas of topics to talk about:
- How could the community be better involved in the design, development and launch of user-facing features?
- What is the role of WMF engineering when it comes to introducing new features?
- What process should be followed when things go wrong (unpopular release)?
- Gradual release: small wikis first and large wikis last doesn't work. Something better is needed, what should it be?
- Does the regular deployment train process worsen crisis situations? If so, how could it be improved?
- How can success be measured for a feature deployment? A/B testing? Microsurveys?
- Should the user-facing feature release process be standardized, or does it need to be tailored for each feature?