Max Semenik

Tags	Technical Debt
Primary Session	Growing the MediaWiki Technical Community
Secondary Sessions

I'm highly interested in having a deep discussion about our technical debt. I've been active in operating on this front myself and I really care how we fare in this aspect, however I see a lack of consensus on tech debt from the development community at large.

We deprecate things and then continue using them. People get irritated when their extensions break due to slightest core changes, even when the extensions themselves are misusing the core interfaces. We can't really run lots of types of static analysis against our code base because the sheer amount of problems detected would make the signal to noise ratio unacceptable. Developing skins for MediaWiki is incredibly painful. Our tests access database a lot, as a result they're slow and fragile. These are just a few examples of pain points haunting our code base and extracting their daily toll from everyone working on it.

I would like to have Tech Debt SIG work in person on addressing these issues. We should define code quality metrics, identify problem areas and create some actionables to address them. We should also discuss approaches to handling this without causing too much discontent from broader developer community.

I believe this would be an important step towards making MediaWiki a better ecosystem and improve our development pace.