On Wed, Nov 13, 2013 at 10:34 PM, Steven Walling <[email protected]> wrote: > Does this mean we get to hire an internal tools team someday? :)
Absolutely, we will get to hire an internal tools team someday. Someday is a nicely relative agile time estimate - maybe I'll give you a burndown chart to go along with it. ;-) In seriousness, I think the tooling problem is very tricky, and a "tools team" isn't necessarily the answer. My worry would be that they immediately take on a very large problem (like creating our own agile PM tool), which then becomes their only development/maintenance responsibility. Distributing the load among other orgs that have the same problem would be ideal. At the same time, the development of tools with a beautiful user experience and a clear product vision tends to benefit from a significant degree of integrated resourcing and leadership. For a very ambitious project like a solid alternative to Mingle/Trello/Pivotal/..., this might be a case where a joint investment by e.g. Wikimedia+Mozilla in a third party org could be a better way to bootstrap something than in-house development. For less ambitious projects (like experimenting with existing Bugzilla-based solutions), the combination of more engineering staffing overall + careful choices where we prioritize effort will hopefully enable us to make steady progress. Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation _______________________________________________ teampractices mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/teampractices
