[Wikitech-l] Re: Why does the train start on Tuesday?

[Tyler Cipriani]

On Mon, Jul 12, 2021 at 10:47 PM Risker  wrote:

> On Mon, 12 Jul 2021 at 19:26, Tyler Cipriani 
> wrote:
>
>> * Can we do something to improve the speed from "a user notices an issue
>>> with the site" to "the right team/owner is aware of it and acts on it"?
>>>
>>
>> Or can we do something to improve how many issues users notice? :)
>>
>>
> As someone who's been around for a long time as an editor, I can say
> honestly that having most of the issues addressed before they hit the
> really big projects has resulted in a huge improvement.  The train really
> works, and the only challenge I really see is what Jon mentions in his
> original post.  Some of those issues aren't really that significant in the
> great scheme of things, but there's a big leap when something takes two
> business days to fix from the Tuesday deployment and two business days to
> fix from the Thursday deployment.
>
> It's not always possible for even the best developer and the best testing
> systems to catch an issue that will be spotted by a hands-on user, several
> of whom are much more familiar with the purpose, expected outcomes and
> change impact on extensions than the people who have written them or QA'd
> them.  That's why there will always be plenty of issues that are identified
> by users, and it is in no way a problem that a small number of them
> (compared to what we saw 10-15 years ago) get through to the end of the
> train before being identified as needing to be addressed (for different
> values of "addressed").
>

Thank you for this response! The train existed before I started thinking
about MediaWiki-software deployment. The impression that it has had a
positive impact on the number of problems seen by users is important
information. Your response is a fantastic answer to a different question
I wonder about a lot: why does the train process give us confidence in the
code being released?

The next part of that question is: are there ways we can gain this
confidence with less disruption? I'd be interested in trying to catalog the
types of problems that are only spotted by hands-on users in the interest
of seeing if patterns emerge.

Thank you again!
– Tyler
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[Wikitech-l] Re: Why does the train start on Tuesday?

[Jon Robson]

Thanks all for the interesting discussion.
I think the  most immediate actionable here is expanding group 1 wikis, so
I'm looking into that here https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T286664.
Ideally, it's my belief that 2 top ten wikis that are not English would
give us the visibility of problems with UI changes that we need.

Some thoughts that come to mind:
* What if group 0 and 1 were merged? How would that impact the train? From
the data for the last 153 trains it seems those usually capture the
majority of our issues. It wouldn't help capturing issues in group 2, but
it would give more of a buffer to fix them.
* What if group 0 happened after the security window on a Monday? Would
that be too stressful/not feasible for those involved?

For me, regarding backporting on Fridays, ideally, as an engineer I
appreciate a buffer going into the weekend to reduce any anxiety around my
work having incapacitated our editors in some way. Deploying code on
Friday's only increases that anxiety in some cases.



On Tue, Jun 22, 2021 at 3:09 PM Jon Robson  wrote:

> Thanks for all the input so far.
>
> On Tue, Jun 22, 2021 at 2:41 PM Amir Sarabadani 
> wrote:
>
>> Jon, I think you're misunderstanding the point of the "No Deployment on
>> Friday" policy.
>>
>
> I don't think I'm misunderstanding the policy? I'm talking explicitly
> about high priority issues UI regressions, not unbreak now (ie. site is
> still functional but styled incorrectly e.g. imagine a link is the wrong
> color). I've used Friday deployments historically, but only for really
> really bad issues.
>
> To give an example, if an icon is visually overlapping text I don't
> consider that an UBN, I consider that unfortunate. If the icon overlap is
> on the edit icon and that's not clickable, definitely UBN and I'm happy to
> go the extra lengths to get a Friday patch out.
>
> I understand the Friday is a buffer, but it's not a great buffer,
> particularly now at the Wikimedia foundation most people observe "Silent
> Fridays", and many people in teams that are involved in decision making
> work in different timezones. Side note what constitutes a UBN UI regression
> is being discussed on the talk page [1].
>
> > Regarding Catalan and Hebrew Wikipedia, the other Amir said it well, I
> don't think I have much to add beside the fact that I have personally seen
> them finding major issues before they hit all Wikipedia languages many
> times, more than I can count.
>
> Apologies if I didn't make myself clear, but it seems I didn't given both
> Amir's comments. I am very happy that we have these, and my question was *not
> *why do we have them, but rather* why do we only have 2*. I want more of
> them and every time I've asked why we don't have more, I've been told it's
> a community decision and that seems odd to me.
>
>
> [1] https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Deployments/Holding_the_train
>
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