I'm not a train conductor, and I don't know anything about the decision-making process that went into the current train schedule. But I'll note that Mondays tend to be observed as holidays, which could cause complications for train scheduling. By my quick count from officewiki, there are 9 US holidays on Mondays in 2021 (not counting the end-of-year holiday).
I've been on teams that switched sprint start dates from Monday to Tuesday because we found the number of Monday holidays disruptive to our cadence. Bill Pirkle Software Engineer www.wikimediafoundation.org On Tue, Jun 22, 2021 at 3:04 PM Jon Robson <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi all > > A few questions to provoke discussion/share knowledge better: > * Why does the train run Tue,Wed, Thur rather than Mon,Tue,Wed > * Why do we only have 2 group 1 Wikipedia's (Catalan and Hebrew) > * Should there be a backport window Friday mornings for certain changes? > > Longer spiel: > > A few weeks ago a change I made led to a small but noticeable UI > regression. The site was perfectly usable, but looked noticeably off. It > was in a more obscure part of the UI so we missed it during QA/code review. > > Late Wednesday a ticket was reported against Wikimedia commons, but I only > became aware of it late Thursday when the regression rolled out to English > Wikipedia. A village pump discussion was started and several duplicate > tickets were created. While the site could still be used it didn't look > great and upset the experience of many editors. > > Once aware of the problem, the issue was easy to fix. A patch was written > on Friday. > > I understand Friday backports are possible, but my team tend to use them > as a last resort in fear of creating more work for my fellow maintainers > over weekend periods. As a result, given the site was still usable, the fix > wasn't backported until the first available backport window on Monday. This > is unfortunately a regular pattern, particularly for small UI regressions. > > We addressed the issue on Monday, but I got feedback from several users > that this particular issue took too long to get backported. I mentioned the > no Friday deploy policy. One user asked me why we don't run the train > Monday-Wednesday and to be honest I wasn't sure. I couldn't find anything > on https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deployments/Train. > > My team tries to avoid big changes on Mondays as Monday merged patches are > more likely to have issues since they don't always get the time to go > through QA during the week by our dedicated QA engineer. > > So... Why don't we run the train Monday-Wednesday? Having a Thursday > buffer during which we can more comfortably backport any issues not caught > in testing, particularly UI bugs would be extremely helpful to my team and > I don't think we'd lose much by losing the Monday to rush last-minute > changes. > > Assuming there are good reasons for Tuesday-Thursday train, I think there > is another problem with our deploy process which is the size of group 1. > Given the complexity of our interfaces (several skins, gadgets, multiple > special pages, user preferences, gadgets, multiple extensions, and > different user rights), generally, many obscure UI bugs get missed in QA by > people who don't use the software every day and have a clear mental model > of how it looks and behaves. My team mostly works on visible user interface > changes and we rely heavily on Catalan and Hebrew Wikipedia users - our > only group 1 wikis to notice errors with UI before they go out to a wider > audience. Given the size of those audiences, that often doesn't work, and > it's often group 2 wikis that make us aware of issues. If we are going to > keep the existing train of Tue-Thur, I think it's essential we have at > least one larger Wikipedia in our group 1 deploy to give us better > protection against UI regressions living over the weekend. My understanding > is for some reason this is not a decision release engineering can make, but > one that requires an on-wiki RFC by the editors themselves. Is that > correct? While I can understand the reluctance of editors to experience > bugs, I'd argue that it's better to have a bug for a day than to have it > for an entire weekend, and definitely something we need to think more > deeply about. > > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list -- [email protected] > To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/postorius/lists/wikitech-l.lists.wikimedia.org/
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