Wikimedia Discovery/Retrospective 2015-07-13
Appearance
Review of previous retrospective action items
[edit](NOTE: These were not reviewed during the 2015-07-13 retrospective itself, but I am documenting them here because in a perfect world, they would have been.)
Kevin
- Schedule our next retrospective
Done
- Clear blockers more quickly/frequently -- e.g. designate a scrummaster, or hold more frequent standups.
Done (hopefully).
- Kevin is the designated blocker-clearer
- Process for pulling tasks into sprints has not been communicated clearly
- Minor progress, but far from resolved
- Kanban (not Scrum) process has not been communicated clearly
- Minor progress, but far from resolved
- Everyone should make sure their contact info is up-to-date
Done (hopefully)
- Didn't get David scheduled into the retrospective
- It is not clear where this failure occurred. Will watch closely moving forward.
- Stacking meetings on one day works well for some people, but not for others
- No change, but meeting schedules are likely to be overhauled soon anyway.
- Lack of IRC norms regarding buffers/bouncers, and whether people read scrollbacks
- No progress.
Dan
- Confusion due to having engineering work in data workboard
Done
- (workboards are now people-centric, so engineering work stays in engineering workboards)
- We are working on a lot of things slowly, rather than a few things quickly
- Ongoing discussions, but no resolution.
- Data Analysis is bushed; ongoing tasks suck up too much bandwidth to allow for long-term planning Hopefully better now
- Protecting Oliver and really everyones time from randomization tasks
- Hopefully better now
Wes/Tomasz
- Guiseppe has represented us in ops, but we might need more Much improved.
- Ops has committed fractions of 4 additional people to help us meet quarterly goals.
- Ongoing discussions about getting more dedicated support
- Some information droppage (notably when Wes/Tomasz are out simultaneously, or Dan by himself)
- More of something to keep an eye on moving forward
- Few of us sitting close to each other
Done
- (SF folks now have desks near each other)
- Budget has been a moving target
- More of something to keep an eye on moving forward
Nik
- Two search outages recently
- Reports were written up
- Nik is a single point of failure
- Improved and ongoing. Nik has actively been transitioning knowledge to others
What's worked well:
[edit]- Quarterly review in general (this used to be, I kid you not, 20+ hours work for the product owner to put together a 60+ slide deck of every single thing done in the quarter, for a 3 hour presentation with half the organisation in the room. This time the expectations were clearer and it was much, much easier.)
- Onboarding template was 80% of totally awesome (compared to 0% at most new jobs) (+1)
- Folks have been updating the onboarding docs
- Nik has been handling his departure well
- Org's offboarding materials seem pretty good
- Wikimania presentation runthrough generated a lot of really helpful feedback
- Lots of improvement in process since the team was formed
- Dan getting a headstart on Q2 planning. (he somehow feels more organized than he has ever felt!)
- Terry, Lila, others feel like we're doing good work
- Dashboard is generating really interesting conversations with nontechnical staff, e.g. Communications, Community Engagement
- Frequently asked question is "Why is this data inconsistent across platforms?" and my response is "Because the platforms are inconsistent with each other" :-)
- Data analysis pipeline, i.e. actually having a data analysis pipeline, continues to work really well
- Strong focus on quarterly goals is a really good thing. Still room to improve in the future.
What could be improved:
[edit]- Prior presentation of quarterly review (show it to the team before presenting it to mgmt)
- maps and wdqs: not moving fast enough to warrant weekly backlog grooming
- Phabricator tickets arn't often very specific, leaving many questions when it comes time to implement. The tickets in the sprint board backlog should be immediatly actionable.
- We don't seem to have a smooth way to convert Dan's "I want X" (a.k.a. user stories) into well-defined tasks + + +1000 <------ Ths one
- Establish {sprint/iteration/weekly/whatever} goals in the form of user stories
- Review success/failure to achieve them
- Perhaps our process should shift to be more Scrum-like + +
- Possibly tasks are larger than they could be
- Still too few people in the office on team meeting days
- When possible, try to get some face-time with the team
- Moving whole-team meeting to Tuesday would help (or move others to Monday)
- Ongoing work toward more clearly and concisely explain what we are doing
- Could improve the terms we use internally (some goals seem ambiguous)
- Maintenance/technical operational work (restarts, adding extra data centres) continues to crop up and detracts from achieving goals. Need clarity around this,.+
- Unclear line between us and ops responsibilities
- Should we designate a Discovery eng as our ops-focused person? (since we didn't get an embedded ops person due to budget reductions)+
- Would be nice to spell out what we expect from them, and what they expect from us
- Should it be more defined to be able to automate deployment?
- Automation can be difficult when the underlying process keeps changing
- Packaging and puppetization are forms of automation
- I feel like we spend more staff time/money talking about dealing with Ops than we would if we just hired an Ops person. A wise man once said this to me. +1 <------ Ths one +1 +1
- This retrospective (not as broad participation as we would hope)
- We have too many short meetings...fewer longer meetings might be more productive
What confuses us:
[edit]- How can we interact more with the community?
Retro of retro
[edit]- Last 15 minutes was best
- Circulate etherpad ahead of time
- Nice balance of what went well and what could be improved
- Monthly feels like a good cadence
Action items
[edit]Voted up
[edit]- We don't seem to have a smooth way to convert Dan's "I want X" (a.k.a. user stories) into well-defined tasks <--Kevin will faciliate
- Maintenance/technical operational work (restarts, adding extra data centres) continues to crop up and detracts from achieving goals. Need clarity around this
- Wes will try to get us a dedicated Ops person. This is a long term plan.
- Kevin will document Who from ops is helping with each of our projects
- Experiment with Scrum <-- Kevin will get with James, Dan and other volunteers
- This is likely to include changes to meeting schedules
Others
[edit]- Circulate retrospective etherpad ahead of time (Kevin)