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Wikimedia Language engineering/Process Overview

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Wikimedia Language Engineering - Agile Processes and Tools Used

Team Structure

Management

  1. Engineering Director

Product Prioritization

  1. Product Owner

Team Facilitation and Coordination

  1. Scrum Master

Development Team

  1. UX and Interaction Designers
  2. Senior Software Engineers
  3. Software Engineers
  4. Associate Software Engineers

Sprint Duration

  1. Each sprint is of 2 Weeks
  2. In exceptional cases like travel, the team can opt for a shorter or longer sprint.
  3. A shorter sprint is not less than 1 week
  4. A longer sprint is not more than 3 weeks
  5. The team has opted for breaks to be taken in between sprints, to coincide with the quarterly travel schedules that last between 7-10 days.
  6. Sprint change i.e. closing and planning happens on the same day (unless a planned sprint break is to occur)

Planning and Development

Product and Release Backlog

  1. User requirements brought forward by the Product Owner are included as stories in the Product Backlog
  2. The team does not maintain a separate Technical Debt Backlog and technical stories (i.e. independent of any user feature) are also included in the Product Backlog (as they surface)
  3. The Release Backlog hasn't been heavily used in the past as the team worked on several products simultaneously
  4. Presently, the team identifies a release milestone (e.g. MVP for Content Translation) and uses a Release Backlog exclusively for this release
  5. Future Release is used as a catchall release for all stories that are beyond the scope of the Release Backlog

Story Refinement & Estimation

  1. Stories from the Release Backlog are refined and prepared for sprint planning
  2. Story refinement is done in 2 phases:
    1. Mid-sprint refinement
    2. Sprint Planning
  3. The Product Owner prioritises user feature stories from the Release Backlog. These stories are passed on to the development team for technical refinement. The Development team provides estimation of size (Small, Medium, Large, Epic) and hours.
  4. The Development team adds any Technical Debt stories that may be seen as necessary for the user feature stories
  5. The team presently does not use Estimation Points and is waiting to recalibrate points according to size and hour based efforts.
  6. Tasks within the stories (if necessary) are created
  7. Depending upon the nature of the story, this exercise may be done in a group or isolated
  8. The refined and prepared stories are brought to the Planning meeting for a round of final estimation check and inclusion into the sprint
  9. Stories are verified to ensure the following are present:
    1. Unambiguous Acceptance Criteria
    2. Estimated size
    3. Estimated hours for completion of the story (including all tasks)

Story Selection

  1. Due to the ongoing point recalibration exercise, the team does not have a stable completion velocity.
  2. Refined Stories are selected for the sprint based on priority
  3. In an attempt to ensure uniformity in efforts, unless absolutely necessary stories are restricted to Medium and Small sizes.
  4. Few Large stories are presently being included in the sprint but their number will be further restricted based on observed trend of effort spent and completion status
  5. A Development Buffer of refined stories is maintained as a priority set from the backlog

Sprint Closing and Retrospectives

  1. Unless otherwise specified, a sprint is completed after 2 weeks.
  2. The completed stories are demonstrated during the sprint closing meeting
  3. If unfinished stories are to be continued, a new card is created from the existing card for inclusion in a subsequent sprint and information of its non-completion added to the existing card
  4. Sprint Retrospective consists of:
    1. action items from the past retrospective
    2. quick review of any important issues on any story (e.g. wrong estimation, unanticipated blockers, diversions etc.)
    3. sprint highlights
    4. suggestions for improvement

Stories

A story typically begins in the analysis phase. Some of the important story properties as defined in Mingle are :

  1. Status – depicts where in the workflow, the story currently is
  2. Owner – the current owner of the story
  3. Priority – indicates the importance of the story.
  4. Story size –indicates the size of the story as small, medium or large. This property is meant to be used for early stage release planning when the team does not have complete details of all the requirements but do want to size the requirements and plan them. The size is indicative and is relative to the rest of the requirements. The story size can be used to determine the right mix of stories to be allocated to each of the sprints and also to determine the sequencing of the stories.
  5. Estimated effort(hrs) – captures the estimated effort in hours and is used for sprint planning. The requirements are analyzed and discussed in detail before the sprint commences and hence the team will be able to task out the requirements and estimate them in hours.
  6. Actual effort (hrs) – captures the actual effort spent on the story at every stage of the workflow. It is meant to capture the sum total of all efforts spent on a story including development, testing and review. It is the team member’s onus to ensure the effort is cumulatively captured.

Transitions

A typical story transition is as shown below :

Ready for analysis -> In analysis -> Ready for Development -> In Development -> Ready for Testing -> In Testing -> Review -> Ready for sign off -> Accepted

Transitions in the Analysis Phase

A story is typically created in the ready for analysis status and is moved to In analysis status prior to the commencement of the sprint.

Transition : Ready for analysis -> In analysis

The following two properties are prompted during this transition:

  1. Priority  : High/medium/low ( Mandatory)
  2. Epic story ( Optional )

Transition : In analysis -> Development buffer

( In case, stories are not top priority for the sprint or need some additional information ) The following four properties are prompted during this transition:

  1. Owner : Assign the correct owner relevant to this stage of the workflow. ( Should be the developer for all development stories )
  2. Story size : Ideally this should already be captured but if not, system prompts for the size. ( If it’s a newly introduced story )
  3. Estimated effort (hrs ) : This is not mandatory at this point but can be captured if the information is handy.
  4. Epic story: If you have missed associating it earlier, here is another chance to do so. ( Please note, it has not been mandatory as there will be stories without epics )
Transitions in the Development Phase

Transition: In analysis -> Ready for development
Transition: Development Buffer -> Ready for development

The following four properties are prompted during this transition:

  1. Owner : Assign the correct owner relevant to this stage of the workflow. ( Should be the developer for all development stories )
  2. Story size : Ideally this should already be captured but if not, system prompts for the size. ( If it’s a newly introduced story )
  3. Estimated effort (hrs ) : This is mandated at this point as the story is deemed ready for development.
  4. Epic story: If you have missed associating it earlier, here is another chance to do so. ( Please note, it has not been mandatory as there will be stories without epics )

Transition: Ready for Development -> In Development

This transition prompts for owner to ensure the person working on the story is allocated.

Transitions in the Post-Development Phase

Transition: In Development -> Ready for Testing Once the Story development is done and is ready for testing, the story can be moved to Ready for testing and the transition prompts for Actual effort and handover of ownership for testing.

Transition: Ready for testing -> In testing Transition moves card to in testing phase.

Transition: In testing -> Review Post testing, when the card is moved to ‘REVIEW’ , the transition prompts for actual effort and handover of ownership for the review phase. Please note the actual effort needs to be added onto as this field will already have the development effort.

Transition: Review -> Ready for sign off Post review, when the card transitions to ‘Ready for sign off’, the transitions prompts for actual effort during the review phase thus capturing all the actual effort. Please note the actual effort needs to be added onto the existing field as this field will already have the testing effort.

Transition: Ready for sign off -> Accepted This is the final transition where the story is deemed done and moved to Accepted status.

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