Strategy/Wikimedia movement/2018-20/Working Groups/Product & Technology/Scoping/Feature/Software Requirements

What is your area of inquiry? edit

Feature/Software Requirements

What is the current situation? edit

The current situation is the software is delivered on a weekly basis with limited visibility to people outside the team working on a specific feature, and very hard to know what is the long term plan. Development of new features and evolution of the platform is just happening without any steering. Wikimedia lacks the structure for software development. Wikimedia Technical Committee is formed to fix problems but does not provide future directions. In addition, involvement of stakeholders is negligible. Missing parts:

  • absence of long term direction of the software development/feature release plans
  • resource allocation to strategic imperatives
  • Lack of stakeholders involvement
  • Community input in the development cycle
  • SDLC communications to external parties

Why this scope? edit

Software is the platform where our content lives. Wikimedia software development communities have been doing their job since Mediawiki was started to be modified. We hope we could satisfy the software users better by organizing the movement structure and communication for the software development.

What are the key questions within the scope of the Working Group? edit

  1. How do we match our prioritized imperative directions to resource allocation?
  2. How do we involve more stakeholders in our developments and releases?
  3. Who should share their voice in what is being developed?
  4. What is the process of getting feedback on software and software requirements?
  5. The evolution methodology allows the developers decide what they do and manages conflicts of the teams. In other hand, the design methodology tries to deliberate future directions considering various voices and organizes the development teams to get the goals. What kind of movement structure would be better for Wikimedia software development?

What are the questions the Working Group needs to ask from the wider community? edit

What is the process and structure for setting software requirement from the community. How do we involve external developers and requirement setters that are not currently present.

Which Software we would like to have and missing, and how can we create processes and plans on building this interface

What are the areas where you see outside expertise is needed? edit

Looking at other large software companies and NGO’s and see if we can learn from their processes, and ways to involve others, similar for example to the way apache foundation, Mozilla foundation or the linux foundation works