Trying to quickly summarize what’s been either on my plate or what’s been generally cooking in Wikimedia, before I postpone writing that again…
Phabricator
- Seven months after migrating from Bugzilla to Phabricator (and keeping Bugzilla available for login to access personal votes and saved searches while making all tickets read-only), we killed Bugzilla for good in May 2015. One tool less to maintain.
John and Daniel turned Bugzilla tickets and their activity/history into a static HTML version at static-bugzilla.wikimedia.org. That static and sanitized database dump was created to keep some historical changes available, for example historical changes to the priority of a ticket were not imported into Phabricator but only the Priority value at the moment of migration. Researchers might also be interested in that (or not).
Nemo was kind enough to use that data dump and import it into a read-only Bugzilla instance on Wikimedia Labs again which also includes tickets’ votes at that time. - Furthermore, no Wikimedia teams are left using Mingle for task management and planning – all moved to Phabricator. We still have a small number of Trello users though.
- Wikimedia Deutschland is working on Phragile (for agile project planning) to replace the custom Phabricator Sprint extension in the long run.
- Two weeks ago, Wikimanía 2015 took place where (among a billion other things) Andrew and I gave introduction talks to the Wikimedia tech infrastructure (we plan to turn that into a generic script that anybody could follow). I also gave an introduction to Wikimedia Phabricator and joined the Community Engagement panel discussion. In general: Great people in the Wikimedia community and great conversations. (Plus need to go to Mexico City again to see more of that.)
- As usual, Phabricator upstream development is moving fast. Upstream now provides Spaces to isolate access areas. Once we’ve set this up (work in progress) in the Wikimedia instance, this will help some of our non-engineering teams to manage tasks that are not (yet) meant for public.
Tech Community Metrics
Recently also spent more time with Tech Community Metrics. Wikimedia has some metrics about code repository activity (Git), code review activity (Gerrit, in the long run to be replaced by Phabricator Differential), mailing lists and IRC. It’s available at korma.wmflabs.org backed by MetricsGrimoire and supported by Bitergia. When we migrated from Bugzilla to Phabricator Maniphest we initially lost any statistics on bug tracker activity but now there is an initial Phabricator Maniphest backend in MetricsGrimoire available.
Again, all this is work in progress and needs way more fine-tuning (see our project workboard).
Again, all this is work in progress and needs way more fine-tuning (see our project workboard).
Congrats!