Wikipediocracy

On July 24, 2014, VP of Engineering Erik Möller wrote: Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2014 14:54:20 -0700
From: Erik Moeller
To: wikimediaannounce-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Announcing Arthur Richards as Team Practices Manager
Message-ID: <CAEg6ZHnczNf9j_TamQuiS-wCwrmAeYmL_UqJytJkoUPdaVo9Mw@mail.gmail.com>



Hi folks,

It’s my great pleasure to announce Arthur Richards as Team Practices Manager for WMF. Arthur will lead a group of ScrumMasters and coaches to scale up our ability to support teams in developing robust processes for software delivery. In this new role, Arthur will report to the VP of Engineering (currently, me).

Arthur’s first engagement in this role will be with the MediaWiki core team in October. He’s also still transitioning responsibilities for the mobile web team to Kristen Lans, who just joined WMF as ScrumMaster. I am very excited about the work ahead. Please join me in congratulating Arthur and wishing him success in this new role. :-)

What follows is some more background about this new group and about Arthur’s leadership in case you’re interested (long):

Arthur joined WMF in June 2010 [1] to support fundraising tech. In the context of team process pains, this team was the first one to adopt an agile development process (specifically, Scrum), and Arthur was in the middle of it all. He took this experience with him when he joined the mobile development team under Tomasz Finc in 2012. The mobile team, too, would soon adopt Scrum, and Arthur took on the role of ScrumMaster later that year to be the "process owner" for the team.

What does that actually mean? It means facilitating the "rituals" that are part of an agile team’s work (e.g. the daily stand-ups, the sprint planning meetings, retrospectives, etc.) and continually facilitating the team’s discovery of improving the way they work. Say it turns out week after week that the team is introducing preventable regressions -- in a situation like this, the ScrumMaster will work with the team to better understand what’s going on and work towards a solution
(e.g. collaboration with QA, improved test coverage, etc.).

In my experience, every team benefits from process improvement, and the highest performing ones view this as a continuous part of the team’s work. Arthur embodies this and I've long viewed the mobile web team as the canonical example in our org that illustrates the benefits of agile development done right.

Throughout his experience as ScrumMaster, Arthur has always made a point of emphasizing the spirit of agile (continued iteration and improvement, problem solving from the bottom up) rather than sticking dogmatically to a specific methodology. He’s also led the development of new processes in the organization that reduce siloed development and improve coordination, e.g. the Scrum of Scrums.

Through most of this time we relied on external consultants to get other teams up to speed on agile development practices. While this has worked reasonably well, the ever-changing personal relationships (a new consultant for every project) and the lack of institutional memory has meant that it was hard to customize and scale the process to our needs.

When we spun up the Flow team last year, we had to make a decision: Will we continue to rely on external consultants, or will we start building internal capacity for this? We decided to experiment with the latter, and Arthur Richards and Tomasz Finc led a one-time agile workshop with the team which was universally well-received and didn't suffer from some of the false starts of consultant engagements.

So, in the budget planning cycle this year Tomasz and Arthur made a pitch to formalize this function in the organization: the Team Practices Group [2]. Given his experience, Arthur is perfectly positioned to lead this group. He’s demonstrated level-headedness, patience, and openness that you want from a coach, guiding teams gently and always focusing on improvements that will be carried forward by the team as a whole.

After consulting with multiple teams who were hungry for more support (e.g. a full-time ScrumMaster, or just agile process support), we decided that Arthur would initially bring on two full-time staffers.

It’s already become clear that this won’t be sufficient. For example, Analytics is expressing a strong need for a full-time ScrumMaster to support the growing team so that developers can focus on development. Whether this is always the right answer remains to be seen. Arthur will work with teams to find a good balance between custom tailored solutions and process consistency for the org.

Ultimately, this new group’s function will be similar to what in traditional organizational models would be a "Project Management Office" - except that, instead of having a group of Project Managers assign work, we want to facilitate self-organizing and increasingly fluid teams coming up with a process that works for them.

We draw lots of inspiration from other orgs (e.g. Spotify’s seminal Scaling Agile paper [3]) but also need to account for the unique requirements of our org (transparency, commitment to open source, etc.).

Working with Arthur is a privilege and a pleasure, and I’m thrilled that he’s agreed to take on this new role. If you're interested in being part of the ongoing conversation about process improvements, we have the public teampractices mailing [4] list for this purpose.

Warmly,

Erik


[1] http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wi ... 00027.html
[2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedi ... ices_Group
[3] https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/101 ... caling.pdf
[4] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/lis ... mpractices

--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation

Scrum is an iterative and incremental agile software development framework for managing product development. It defines "a flexible, holistic product development strategy where a development team works as a unit to reach a common goal", challenges assumptions of the "traditional, sequential approach" to product development, and enables teams to self-organize by encouraging physical co-location or close online collaboration of all team members, as well as daily face-to-face communication among all team members and disciplines in the project.

A key principle of Scrum is its recognition that during a project the customers can change their minds about what they want and need (often called "requirements churn"), and that unpredicted challenges cannot be easily addressed in a traditional predictive or planned manner. As such, Scrum adopts an empirical approach—accepting that the problem cannot be fully understood or defined, focusing instead on maximizing the team's ability to deliver quickly and respond to emerging requirements.

On July 24, 2014, VP of Engineering Erik Möller wrote: Arthur joined WMF in June 2010... in 2012... Arthur took on the role of ScrumMaster.... Throughout his experience as ScrumMaster, Arthur has always made a point of emphasizing the spirit of agile (continued iteration and improvement, problem solving from the bottom up) rather than sticking dogmatically to a specific methodology.

To earn your CSM certificate, you must take a CSM course from a Certified Scrum Trainer and demonstrate your progress through our online CSM test. ... Then attend a two-day CSM course taught by a Certified Scrum Trainer. After completing the course, you will need to pass the CSM test. To get a passing score, you must correctly answer 24 of the 35 questions.

defines "a flexible, holistic product development strategy where a development team works as a unit to reach a common goal", challenges assumptions of the "traditional, sequential approach" to product development, and enables teams to self-organize by encouraging physical co-location or close online collaboration of all team members, as well as daily face-to-face communication among all team members and disciplines in the project.

lilburne wrote: Anyone that can't write in a plain natural language and instead resort to a string meaningless bullshit phrases doesn't understand what they are doing.

Hex wrote:

lilburne wrote: Anyone that can't write in a plain natural language and instead resort to a string meaningless bullshit phrases doesn't understand what they are doing.

I think you need to upgrade your vocabulary, because that was all pretty basic stuff.

physical co-location or close online collaboration of all team members, as well as daily face-to-face communication

lilburne wrote: parse

physical co-location or close online collaboration of all team members, as well as daily face-to-face communication

hmmm!

Hex wrote:

lilburne wrote: parse

physical co-location or close online collaboration of all team members, as well as daily face-to-face communication

hmmm!

I'm not going to patronize you by repeating that quote with every word hyperlinked to a dictionary.

HRIP7 wrote:From Wikipedia's Scrum (software development) (T-H-L) article:

Scrum is an iterative and incremental agile software development framework for managing product development. It defines "a flexible, holistic product development strategy where a development team works as a unit to reach a common goal", challenges assumptions of the "traditional, sequential approach" to product development, and enables teams to self-organize by encouraging physical co-location or close online collaboration of all team members, as well as daily face-to-face communication among all team members and disciplines in the project.

A key principle of Scrum is its recognition that during a project the customers can change their minds about what they want and need (often called "requirements churn"), and that unpredicted challenges cannot be easily addressed in a traditional predictive or planned manner. As such, Scrum adopts an empirical approach—accepting that the problem cannot be fully understood or defined, focusing instead on maximizing the team's ability to deliver quickly and respond to emerging requirements.

So let's see ... this means that a team of people work closely together to get the job done, taking any changes in customer requirements into account.

Gee, why didn't anybody ever think of that before!

Randy from Boise wrote:You and your demystification....... We only speak Trendy Management Jargon here!

lilburne wrote:

defines "a flexible, holistic product development strategy where a development team works as a unit to reach a common goal", challenges assumptions of the "traditional, sequential approach" to product development, and enables teams to self-organize by encouraging physical co-location or close online collaboration of all team members, as well as daily face-to-face communication among all team members and disciplines in the project.

Anyone that can't write in a plain natural language and instead resort to a string meaningless bullshit phrases doesn't understand what they are doing.

Midsize Jake wrote:
To some extent this may seem quite reasonable and even intuitive, but the reality is that in most product-development efforts, nobody sets any priorities at all, everyone takes on a task that they personally want (which could take anywhere from a few hours to several years), and there's all sorts of backstabbing and blame-shifting going on, usually coordinated by a sales manager because nobody else wants to do it.

Vigilant wrote:It's a formula for self back patting and empire building.

Hex wrote:I'm not going to patronize you by repeating that quote with every word hyperlinked to a dictionary.

1: an important-sounding usually technical word or phrase often of little meaning used chiefly to impress laymen
2: a voguish word or phrase —called also buzz phrase

to talk or write a lot without giving any useful information or any clear answers

Hex wrote:

lilburne wrote: Anyone that can't write in a plain natural language and instead resort to a string meaningless bullshit phrases doesn't understand what they are doing.

I think you need to upgrade your vocabulary, because that was all pretty basic stuff.

Hex wrote:

lilburne wrote: parse

physical co-location or close online collaboration of all team members, as well as daily face-to-face communication

hmmm!

I'm not going to patronize you by repeating that quote with every word hyperlinked to a dictionary.

SB_Johnny wrote:WMF's employees are selected for people who are happy to spend 8+ hours a day chatting away on IRC.

SB_Johnny wrote:

Hex wrote:

lilburne wrote: parse

physical co-location or close online collaboration of all team members, as well as daily face-to-face communication

hmmm!

I'm not going to patronize you by repeating that quote with every word hyperlinked to a dictionary.

Nope, that's not plain English, though I think I understand it. He's really just saying that they should sit around long tables (rather than in cubicles), and spend a lot of the day talking to each other (either at the table or in meetings and meetings and meetings).

Poetlister wrote: The point is that while all the words are reasonably common and everyday, they are being used as part of a management consultancy piece of drivel, often with a slightly different meaning from the one that I (and probably most people here) would think they had.

SB_Johnny wrote:He's really just saying that they should sit around long tables (rather than in cubicles), and spend a lot of the day talking to each other (either at the table or in meetings and meetings and meetings).

Hex wrote:

Poetlister wrote: The point is that while all the words are reasonably common and everyday, they are being used as part of a management consultancy piece of drivel, often with a slightly different meaning from the one that I (and probably most people here) would think they had.

Except it's not drivel. You also need to work on your comprehension skills, or else stick to reading things written in words of one syllable.

It defines "a flexible, holistic product development strategy where a development team works as a unit to reach a common goal", challenges assumptions of the "traditional, sequential approach" to product development, and enables teams to self-organize by encouraging physical co-location or close online collaboration of all team members, as well as daily face-to-face communication among all team members and disciplines in the project.

technobabble translator wrote:It is a flexible and complete product development strategy in which developers work as a closely-knit team with a clearly defined set of objectives. The team members are located physically in one area, or use telepresence to promote collaboration, including daily face-to-face meetings which involve all team members and leaders.

Hex wrote:

Poetlister wrote: The point is that while all the words are reasonably common and everyday, they are being used as part of a management consultancy piece of drivel, often with a slightly different meaning from the one that I (and probably most people here) would think they had.

Except it's not drivel. You also need to work on your comprehension skills, or else stick to reading things written in words of one syllable.

The Pointy Headed Boss wrote: A key principle of Scrum is its recognition that during a project the customers can change their minds about what they want and need (often called "requirements churn"), and that unpredicted challenges cannot be easily addressed in a traditional predictive or planned manner. As such, Scrum adopts an empirical approach—accepting that the problem cannot be fully understood or defined, focusing instead on maximizing the team's ability to deliver quickly and respond to emerging requirements.

On July 25, 2014, Team Practices Manager Arthur Richards wrote: Please welcome Kristen Lans, ScrumMaster

Hi everyone,

I'm very pleased to welcome Kristen Lans to the Wikimedia Foundation, as the first ScrumMaster [1][2] hire into the newly formed Team Practices Group [3]. Kristen will be taking over ScrumMaster duties for the Mobile Web and Mobile Apps Engineering teams.

Prior to joining WMF, Kristen worked for six years with the TED prize-winning Encyclopedia of Life project [4], a free, open resource that aims to provide access to knowledge about all life on Earth. Kristen helped to pilot and facilitate the Encyclopedia of Life organization's agile development and planning processes, and enjoyed working with the project's global community of contributors. Kristen is thrilled to be continuing to work towards open knowledge sharing for all at an even larger scale.

Kristen currently lives in Cape Cod, Massachusetts with her husband and dog, and is planning to relocate to the Bay Area by the end of the year, and is looking forward to eating her way through the San Francisco's tasty restaurants and taking advantage of the amazing outdoor activities in the area.


--
Arthur Richards
Team Practices Manager
[[User:Awjrichards]]


[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ScrumMaster#Scrum_Master
[2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedi ... crummaster
[3] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedi ... ices_Group
[4] http://eol.org

Wikipedia wrote: Scrum Master

Scrum is facilitated by a Scrum Master, who is accountable for removing impediments to the ability of the team to deliver the product goals and deliverables. The Scrum Master is not a traditional team lead or project manager, but acts as a buffer between the team and any distracting influences. The Scrum Master ensures that the Scrum process is used as intended. The Scrum Master is the enforcer of the rules of Scrum, often chairs key meetings, and challenges the team to improve. The role has also been referred to as a servant-leader to reinforce these dual perspectives.

The Scrum Master differs from a project manager in that the latter may have people management responsibilities unrelated to the role of Scrum Master. The Scrum Master role excludes any such additional people responsibilities. In fact, there is no role of project manager in Scrum at all, because none is needed. The traditional responsibilities of a project manager have been divided up and reassigned among the three Scrum roles, and mostly to the Development Team and the Product Owner, rather than to the Scrum Master. Practicing Scrum with the addition of a project manager indicates a fundamental misunderstanding of Scrum, and typically results in conflicting responsibilities, unclear authority, and sub-optimal results.[fn]

Footnote: Pete Deemer, Gabrielle Benefield, Craig Larman, and Bas Vodde, The Scrum Primer: A Lightweight Guide to the Theory and Practice of Scrum. (Version 2.0) InfoQ, 2012. http://www.infoq.com/minibooks/Scrum_Primer

Randy from Boise wrote:And our new "Team Practices Manager" announces the first of his two new hires...

From the Wikimedia-l mailing list:

On July 25, 2014, Team Practices Manager Arthur Richards wrote: Kristen helped to pilot and facilitate the Encyclopedia of Life organization's agile development and planning processes, and enjoyed working with the project's global community of contributors.

Randy from Boise wrote:Taking advantage of one of the footnotes above, we learn:

Wikipedia wrote: Scrum Master

Scrum is facilitated by a Scrum Master, who is accountable for removing impediments to the ability of the team to deliver the product goals and deliverables. The Scrum Master is not a traditional team lead or project manager, but acts as a buffer between the team and any distracting influences. The Scrum Master ensures that the Scrum process is used as intended. The Scrum Master is the enforcer of the rules of Scrum, often chairs key meetings, and challenges the team to improve. The role has also been referred to as a servant-leader to reinforce these dual perspectives.

The Scrum Master differs from a project manager in that the latter may have people management responsibilities unrelated to the role of Scrum Master. The Scrum Master role excludes any such additional people responsibilities. In fact, there is no role of project manager in Scrum at all, because none is needed. The traditional responsibilities of a project manager have been divided up and reassigned among the three Scrum roles, and mostly to the Development Team and the Product Owner, rather than to the Scrum Master. Practicing Scrum with the addition of a project manager indicates a fundamental misunderstanding of Scrum, and typically results in conflicting responsibilities, unclear authority, and sub-optimal results.[fn]

Footnote: Pete Deemer, Gabrielle Benefield, Craig Larman, and Bas Vodde, The Scrum Primer: A Lightweight Guide to the Theory and Practice of Scrum. (Version 2.0) InfoQ, 2012. http://www.infoq.com/minibooks/Scrum_Primer

link

And there you're wrong, and this may be why you seem to have difficulty communicating. Let me disabuse you of a notion: We are not your servants and never have been. --Jorm (WMF) (talk) 01:09, 15 October 2013 (UTC)

Randy from Boise wrote:Second: what the hell is "scrum"? It strikes me as a phoney-ass jargon term for the concept of giving small work teams sufficient autonomy to organize their own tasks — which in WMF's case is essential because judging by the Glass Door exit surveys we all saw a while back, the management team is probably incompetent to provide real direction and oversight.

Randy from Boise wrote:Taking advantage of one of the footnotes above, we learn:

Wikipedia wrote: Scrum Master

Scrum is facilitated by a Scrum Master, who is accountable for removing impediments to the ability of the team to deliver the product goals and deliverables. The Scrum Master is not a traditional team lead or project manager, but acts as a buffer between the team and any distracting influences. The Scrum Master ensures that the Scrum process is used as intended. The Scrum Master is the enforcer of the rules of Scrum, often chairs key meetings, and challenges the team to improve. The role has also been referred to as a servant-leader to reinforce these dual perspectives.

The Scrum Master differs from a project manager in that the latter may have people management responsibilities unrelated to the role of Scrum Master. The Scrum Master role excludes any such additional people responsibilities. In fact, there is no role of project manager in Scrum at all, because none is needed. The traditional responsibilities of a project manager have been divided up and reassigned among the three Scrum roles, and mostly to the Development Team and the Product Owner, rather than to the Scrum Master. Practicing Scrum with the addition of a project manager indicates a fundamental misunderstanding of Scrum, and typically results in conflicting responsibilities, unclear authority, and sub-optimal results.[fn]

Footnote: Pete Deemer, Gabrielle Benefield, Craig Larman, and Bas Vodde, The Scrum Primer: A Lightweight Guide to the Theory and Practice of Scrum. (Version 2.0) InfoQ, 2012. http://www.infoq.com/minibooks/Scrum_Primer

link

Randy from Boise wrote:I actually downloaded that stupid "The Scrum Primer: A Lightweight's Guide" or whatever the title is, cited by Mr. Möller.

I've got no tech background, but I know a bullshit job when I see it. "The Scrum Master is a coach and teacher" (emphasis in the original, pg. 5.) Ummm, yeah, right, pay me to do that, will you?

So we need a new coordinator of these coaches and teachers...

They also claim there to be no "Project Manager" in the world of Scrums — instead it's a "Product Owner."

I haven't found any reference to magical crystals yet, but there are daily meetings and big meetings lasting multiple hours every two weeks or so.

I don't envy those of you stuck in the lunatic world of big business...


RfB

FOR YOUR ENTERTAINMENT:

The Scrum Primer: A Lightweight's Guide (or whatever) : link

A 20 page pamphlet co-written by four people, who probably did it in a two week "Sprint" following a four hour "Sprint Planning" session...

Kumioko wrote:

Randy from Boise wrote:I actually downloaded that stupid "The Scrum Primer: A Lightweight's Guide" or whatever the title is, cited by Mr. Möller.

I've got no tech background, but I know a bullshit job when I see it. "The Scrum Master is a coach and teacher" (emphasis in the original, pg. 5.) Ummm, yeah, right, pay me to do that, will you?

So we need a new coordinator of these coaches and teachers...

They also claim there to be no "Project Manager" in the world of Scrums — instead it's a "Product Owner."

I haven't found any reference to magical crystals yet, but there are daily meetings and big meetings lasting multiple hours every two weeks or so.

I don't envy those of you stuck in the lunatic world of big business...


RfB

FOR YOUR ENTERTAINMENT:

The Scrum Primer: A Lightweight's Guide (or whatever) : link

A 20 page pamphlet co-written by four people, who probably did it in a two week "Sprint" following a four hour "Sprint Planning" session...

Yeah this Scrum initiative by the WMF is just another typical poorly executed and thought out product/idea that we have come to expect from them. It would have been far better to use a Lean Six Sigma approach instead of this Scrum crap. Its still not perfect and probably wouldn't work in the WMF environment, but it would at least be better.

Poetlister wrote:

Hex wrote:

lilburne wrote: Anyone that can't write in a plain natural language and instead resort to a string meaningless bullshit phrases doesn't understand what they are doing.

I think you need to upgrade your vocabulary, because that was all pretty basic stuff.

The point is that while all the words are reasonably common and everyday, they are being used as part of a management consultancy piece of drivel, often with a slightly different meaning from the one that I (and probably most people here) would think they had.

Hex wrote:

Poetlister wrote: The point is that while all the words are reasonably common and everyday, they are being used as part of a management consultancy piece of drivel, often with a slightly different meaning from the one that I (and probably most people here) would think they had.

Except it's not drivel. You also need to work on your comprehension skills, or else stick to reading things written in words of one syllable.

enwikibadscience wrote:

Hex wrote: Except it's not drivel. You also need to work on your comprehension skills, or else stick to reading things written in words of one syllable.

Me, too, then. Because it is without meaning.

Hex wrote:

enwikibadscience wrote:

Hex wrote: Except it's not drivel. You also need to work on your comprehension skills, or else stick to reading things written in words of one syllable.

Me, too, then. Because it is without meaning.

Tell me when you've retrained as a programmer. Until then, I'll write off biology stuff that I don't understand as "without meaning", and you can tell me to retrain as a biologist.

Notvelty wrote: Scott, it's a load of garbage. If it means something to you, perhaps you've been spending too much time writing government RFTs.

Hex wrote:

Notvelty wrote: Scott, it's a load of garbage. If it means something to you, perhaps you've been spending too much time writing government RFTs.

I have no idea what an RFT is, and you're talking out of your arsehole.

Notvelty wrote:

Hex wrote:

Notvelty wrote: Scott, it's a load of garbage. If it means something to you, perhaps you've been spending too much time writing government RFTs.

I have no idea what an RFT is, and you're talking out of your arsehole.

Request For Tender

And if you don't know that, it does rather deprecate your experience here.

HRIP7 wrote:I would respectfully suggest that we may have exhausted the topic of language use in the management of software development and that further discussion of this aspect may yield diminishing benefits to us.

Hex wrote:

enwikibadscience wrote:

Hex wrote: Except it's not drivel. You also need to work on your comprehension skills, or else stick to reading things written in words of one syllable.

Me, too, then. Because it is without meaning.

Tell me when you've retrained as a programmer. Until then, I'll write off biology stuff that I don't understand as "without meaning", and you can tell me to retrain as a biologist.

enwikibadscience wrote:

Hex wrote:

enwikibadscience wrote:

Hex wrote: Except it's not drivel. You also need to work on your comprehension skills, or else stick to reading things written in words of one syllable.

Me, too, then. Because it is without meaning.

Tell me when you've retrained as a programmer. Until then, I'll write off biology stuff that I don't understand as "without meaning", and you can tell me to retrain as a biologist.

I am a programmer. It's boring. There is no secret deep meaning to it. Retraining is not needed. You may write off biology if you please. A trade that forces me to engage in meaningless babble or you write off life. A whatever moment if there ever was one. Go for it.

Stierlitz wrote:

enwikibadscience wrote:

Hex wrote:

enwikibadscience wrote:

Hex wrote: Except it's not drivel. You also need to work on your comprehension skills, or else stick to reading things written in words of one syllable.

Me, too, then. Because it is without meaning.

Tell me when you've retrained as a programmer. Until then, I'll write off biology stuff that I don't understand as "without meaning", and you can tell me to retrain as a biologist.

I am a programmer. It's boring. There is no secret deep meaning to it. Retraining is not needed. You may write off biology if you please. A trade that forces me to engage in meaningless babble or you write off life. A whatever moment if there ever was one. Go for it.

Rimshot.