Grants talk:Project/Rapid/Wiki Education Foundation/AgileVentures experiment/Report

Comments on final report

Hi User:Sage (Wiki Ed). Thank you for your work on this project! Despite the end results, it’s inspiring to hear about the unanticipated benefits and how they could help future onboarding processes.
This report has been accepted. We have a few remaining questions/comments and look forward to hearing your response:

1. Can you elaborate more on the pain points you identified in the developer onboarding process?
   
2. What kind of project management support did AgileVentures offer?
   

Thank you again for all your work. Best, --SMalik (WMF) (talk)

Pain points: some of this was related to streamlining the format and adding detail about the requirements for getting a development environment set up for different operating systems and varying levels of expertise, and some of it was related to my process for documenting and triaging bugs according to the technologies involved. Newbie developers often come in with some knowledge of some of the technologies in the stack but not others (in particular, CSS / Ruby & Rails / Javascript & React). Especially for newcomer-friendly tasks, it's really useful to tag development tasks with the technologies required to solve them. And some of it was bugs or unnecessarily complicated aspects of the setup process that we were able to replace or remove.

The AV project manager did several main things, mostly of the cat-herding variety:

• Organized and ran regular daily scrum meetings and periodic sprint planning meetings
• Handled github-related admin tasks like assigning tasks to the people who were working on them
• Encouraged new people who were interested in contributing
• Provided a point of contact on Slack (the main venue for the AV community) during the times when I was not available, particularly (from my timezone) the very early morning

--Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:51, 2 May 2017 (UTC)