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Community Tech/Retrospectives/2015-10-26

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Action items from last time

[edit]
  • Should have email convo about most work being in English so far. (Frances)
    • email sent
    • Wasn't as bad as we thought, but should keep it in mind
  • Maybe could be a standard practice to circulate a couple paragraphs about each completed investigation task to see if that triggers discussion? (Kaldari)
    • Informal norm
  • Frances will move the github workflows email thread forward
    • Should be written up on the wiki, probably, maybe after another few rounds of trying out the process
    • Successfully got feedback/etc. by following the proposed process, excellent
    • (done)
  • Danny: Should we have a standard story grooming meeting, mid-sprint? +++
    • -- scheduled
  • Should we have a central place for people to report broken gadgets/templates etc.? Not allowed on Phabricator right now. Perhaps a page on Meta? Or a dedicated Phab board.+++
    • -- Email sent (Danny will follow up more)
  • Kaldari + Danny need to work together on wishlist survey
    • -- Done, more coming up later today
  • Kaldari will involve Johan in getting Template:Cite doi RfC closed
    • Done, but still not closed
  • Danny will set up a meeting with team and Kunal (and others?) about Gadgets 2.0
    • -- Done, happening tomorrow

What has gone well?

[edit]
  • Dev work has gone well. RevisionSlider prototype and Special:GadgetUsage page are both nearly done
  • Impressive results on the satisfaction survey, far more responses than we thought +2
  • Story grooming debut meeting was very useful
    • We decided on a set of tasks for next sprint, currently In Analysis
  • Reviewing things on GitHub seems to be going OK and is less confusing than it used to be +1
  • We have a PM and it's *fantastic*, basically, I can more easily focus on my work without worrying about larger-scale stuff; Ryan does more engineering management +1

What could have gone better?

[edit]
  • Danny's mostly focused on tech + wishlist surveys, getting up to speed on Phab tasks
  • Unclear on our sprint commitment (is it really a commitment?) ++++ (this is probably similar to the process discussion)
    • Should we try doing some themed sprints? (Gadgets, Page stats, i18n?)+
  • I feel blocked on plagiabot but am not sure why, some of it is probably that I don't know how to set up a dev environment for that +++
  • Haven't been having agile workshops

What else is on your mind?

[edit]
  • Who is the WMF DBA now that Springle is gone? i.e. who do we ping for database-related code review (Jaime Crespo?)
  • Possible designer resource
  • Part-time Outreachy mentoring tends to take up serious amount of time (as volunteer, doesn't sound sustainable to me...)
  • Creating subtasks from sprint tasks and keeping them out of sprint causes unnecessary context-switching
  • Scrum/kanban/how are our processes going/what works best? ++++

Deeper discussions

[edit]

Sprint commitments, kanban, etc.

[edit]
  • Unclear on our sprint commitment (is it really a commitment?) ++++
  • Scrum/kanban/how are our processes going/what works best? ++++
  • How do you deal with things currently coming in?
    • Should still go through review/estimation/prioritization before being worked on
    • But new items can jump straight to the top of the queue
  • Not much different from today's process
    • Maybe break down into smaller subtasks?
  • As a dev, most important is to have sensible work queued up--minimize contex switching
    • Stream of tasks seems like a better fit than a multi-week commitment
  • Find a balance between large and small tasks
    • Splitting tasks creates overhead, but value might outweigh costs
  • Would splitting tasks reduce chances of being blocked?
    • Some devs prefer granular tasks
    • When shouldn't we split up tasks?
      • Distinction between breaking at PM level (stories) v.s dev level (eng tasks)
      • Shaving vs. exploding to split stories/tasks bit-by-bit or all at once
      • Devs should feel free to shave off additional tasks when helpful (involve PM for prioritization if [and only if] appropriate)
  • For tomorrow's sprint, consider whether it's a commitment or just a goal...have a shared understanding as a team as to the intent
    • Smaller tasks might make commitment easier.
  • Single sprint goal is harder for this team due to diverse tasks
  • Phab can set WIP limits, but not task count limits if you use story points
    • Can use the story point limits as motivation to get more granular (i.e. break those 15-point stories down to 5 points each)

Action Items

[edit]
  • For this week, aim for smaller tasks
  • Kevin: Agile workshop next week (Kanban/sprint planning)
  • Follow up on plagiabot offline (on mailing list?) (Frances)
  • Write up github workflow on wiki somewhere (Meta Development subpage) (Frances) (Done)
  • Talk to Quim about GSoc commitments - Niharika will initiate email
  • Kaldari: Post redacted retro notes
  • Danny to follow up on template/broken gadgets page/board
  • Follow up on DBA question (Kaldari will investigate)

Retro of retro

[edit]
  • Still really like the longer meeting, feels much less rushed +1
  • Helpful, this format works well ++
  • Good facilitation+
  • Do we feel like we get to have enough in-depth discussion?
  • Would be nicer if everyone fills up the buckets before the meeting starts (not always possible, I agree)
  • 2 weeks is good I think +