User:RobLa-WMF/Architecture FY 2016-17 budget

2016-01-14: This page is a very early draft page where RobLa-WMF is using to plan out the FY 2016-17 budget for the Wikimedia Architecture Team team (which as of this writing, is only RobLa-WMF).

RobLa's thoughts

Everything below is probably written in first person by RobLa

TODO:

• Clarify FY 2016-17 goals on this page
• Flesh out Wikimedia Architecture Team team page
• Figure out more appropriate home for draft content like this (assuming there is one)
• Move Phab T123606: RFC: Improving and scaling our technical decision making process forward

Here's some general high-level top-of-my-head bullet points about goals, without referring back to other stuff that is probably more important.

The mission of of WMF's Architecture Team is to establish social norms within WMF Engineering which obviate the need for traditional top-down management. Wikimedia Foundation hires engineers that clearly share the vision and the mission of the Wikimedia movement, such that they intrinsically feel responsible. Failures often occur when communication regarding complicated technical problems fails at some level.

The problems the Wikimedia Architecture Team plans to address are:

• Helping identify existing technical debt in Wikimedia software
• Avoiding creating new technical debt unnecessarily
• Ensuring new technical debt that is incurred is done as thoughtfully as practical
• Helping Wikimedia engineers develop better habits to achieve the above
• Helping build alignment between different engineering groups (encouraging better communication habits between groups and discouraging walls between engineering silos)