On 01/09/2013 10:24 PM, Matthew Flaschen wrote: > On 01/09/2013 08:56 PM, Jay Ashworth wrote: >> It's the new year, and in light of the recent poll about which devs are >> working on what, let me make another, albeit vaguely macabre, suggestion: >> >> If you're a developer, or other staffer, can the people around you pick >> up the pieces if you get hit by a bus? How badly will it impact delivery >> and delivery scheduling of what you're working on? > > This is a good reminder of yet another reason to document things. > >> Is the institutional knowledge about our architecture and plans sufficiently >> well documented and spread out that we don't have anyone with an unreasonably >> high bus factor? > > However, high bus factor is good. As Wikipedia states, "The bus factor > is the total number of key developers who would need to be incapacitated > (as by getting hit by a bus/truck) to send the project into such > disarray that it would not be able to proceed". > > The higher this is, the less likely the project actually would be > derailed for such a reason. > > Matt Flaschen
I created https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Developers/Maintainers partially to document the activities (highlighted in red) where our bus factor is dangerously low. And it's one of the reasons why LevelUp is useful; it's a systematic way to improve bus factor. Code reviewing is not just a gate to keep bugs out of code, but a social step, to get a second set of eyes on code, and to spread knowledge around. Code review is a much more natural way, rather than sending out a mass email, to keep colleagues informed about changes to areas of their interest. (Of course, if someone creates a new test methodology or wants to do something big, there should be appropriate communication about that.) Chris Steipp and I have had some success running documentation sprints where we improve very specific bits of mediawiki.org, and I would love to help others do similarly. -- Sumana Harihareswara Engineering Community Manager Wikimedia Foundation _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
