Wikimedia Release Engineering Team/SpiderPig
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SpiderPig
Developing a web UI for our MediaWiki deployment system
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SpiderPig is the code name for a hypothesis attached to the Wiki Experiences (WE) WE6 hypothesis of the Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan 2024-2025.
The hypothesis reads:
If we create a new deployment UI that provides more information to the deployer and reduce the amount of privilege needed to do deployment, it will make deployment easier and open deployments to more users as measured by the number of unique deployers and number of patches backported as a percentage of our overall deployments.
Why
[edit]Developer satisfaction survey deployment data shows an increase in satisfaction with deployments from 2021 to 2024. Comments on the survey indicate that this was due to the release of the scap backport command. Scap backport made deployments a single step. As of 2024, scap backport is the most common way to deploy backports.
Scap backport improved the user interface (UI) for deployments which increased satisfaction with deployments and increased the number of deploys using the tool. Improvements to the deployment UI can increase satisfaction with deployment and change deployer behavior. A better deployment UI may increase satisfaction and increase the number of people willing to deploy.