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
- This is reminding me of learning styles differences, global vs. sequential (http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/ILSdir/styles.htm)
- 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 +