Moritz Schubotz

Tags	Artificial Intelligence, Code Review, Testing, Volunteer Developers
Primary Session	Growing the MediaWiki Technical Community
Secondary Sessions

Title Developing software in a wiki way

Background Over the last 15 years, MediaWiki evolved from a simple PHP script to a complex and highly integrated family of products and services, serving knowledge to billions of humans. Every change might cause an instability or a complete failure of the system. Thus, measures including code review, automated unit testing and code/ product ownership, have been established to guarantee the stability of the software. The drawback of this approach is that improving the software became very challenging for volunteer contributors. This proposal seeks to lower the barriers for volunteer contributors while maintaining the stability of the system.

Advice (1) Reduce the effort of code review by applying Artificial Intelligence methods. Thus, reviewers can focus on non-formal comments. (2) Develop a dialog platform that ensures that volunteer contributors are aware of the next steps and the roadmap for their change on the way to production. (3) Establish a team that supports volunteer developers, who want to make a difference that is not listed in the annual plan by providing temporary code or product ownership. (4) Improve testing and evaluation to measure the effect of every single change and to identify code or even whole services that are no longer neccary and can be switched off.