2011 Wikimedia fundraiser

Rationale

The Annual fundraiser is the largest revenue generator for the foundation and happens annually. Lots of the discussion about the annual fundraiser happens on meta.

Timeline

• July 2011 - November 2011 (pre-fundraiser)
  • Fundraiser prep work
  • New features
  • Bug fixes to old problems
  • Any necessary major re-architecting of the pipeline (for scalability, resilience, etc).
• November 2011 - January 2012 (fundraiser)
  • Support broader fundraising team (bug fixes, new features as needed, etc)

User requirements

User requirements are currently maintained in our project management tool, Mingle (login: guest/guest). Stories in the 'Current Sprint' tab are currently being worked on, 'Next sprint' contains stories being prepared for the next sprint, 'Full story board' has an un-prioritized list of all stories that have been written and their status.

Methodology

As a general rule, the fundraising team works in two-week development sprints, with specific tasks decided based on priority during the sprint prior. This allows to quickly iterate through discrete tasks and quickly respond to the changing needs of the fundraiser. The downside to this approach, however, is that it can make it difficult for people outside of the regular fundraising development team to get involved. So, we are also building a backlog of necessary tasks that can be worked on outside of the regular development sprints.

Test plan

• Unit testing
• Twice-weekly regular 'fundraiser' tests (typically Thursday/Friday 1030am PDT). See the fundraising page on meta for the schedule/updates.

Release management plan

Due to the fast pace of the fundraiser, we release often. At the beginning of each sprint, code that is deployment ready from previous sprints gets deployed.

Communications

• General communications: meta
• #wikimedia-fundraising
• Development sprint history
• Post-sprint blog posts to the engineering blog
  • 2011 Fundraiser Engineering Is Underway!, Arthur Richards, Wikimedia blog, August 18th, 2011.
  • Fundraiser Engineering heats up!, Arthur Richards, Wikimedia blog, September 8th, 2011.

Additional documents

• Documentation: wikitech
• Task management: Mingle
• Bugs: Bugzilla
• Status updates
• Development sprint history
• Unreviewed fundraising commits by repository: Wikimedia, MediaWiki