Readers/Web/Team/Retrospectives/2014-05-19

Events of the last two iterations

Upsidedown catfish (14 Apr - 28 Apr)

Notable events:

• Kenan’s departure announced
• Maryana starts filling in
• Max moves to SF

Vacation/travel time:

• Arthur (14 Apr)
• Kaldari ( - 29 April [working from Belize]

Points carried over from previous iteration: 23 Points attempted: 54 Points completed: 47

Vampire squid (28 Apr - 19 May, extra week for Zürich hackathon)

Notable events:

• Lightning deploy
• We start using Trello
• Zürich hackathon and associated travel
• Kenan leaves/Maryana fully takes over
• Tablet redirect date set for June 17
• Jon make a blog post ‘The Wikipedia Editors Behind the Curtain'
• Worked on mobile VE citations with VE team (still waiting on some code review)

Vacation/travel time:

• Maryana (7 May - 12 May [hackathon])
• Arthur (5 May - 12 May [vacation and hackathon])
• Juliusz (7 May - [hackathon and vacation and working remotely])
• Jon (7 May - [hackathon and working remotely)
• Moiz (7 May - [hackathon and working remotely)

Points carried over from previous iteration: 8 Points attempted: 32 Points completed: 14

What worked?

• Having Max around
• Having Maryana back
  • I stopped having to ask where the product owner was :P +1 <3
• We pushed stuff out for once (to stable) OMGZ - history, contributions, user profile, last modified bar
• Bahodir.. maybe...
• Trello is easier than Mingle AND STICKERS!! OMGZ!
• Notifications on Trello - a mechanism to poke people that's better than Gerrit
• Trello app+1
• HACKATHONZ
• Fixed security bug with no major drama
• No speedbumps even with major staffing changes in design & product - you guys are a well-oiled machine!
• Switching to Vagrant full-time
• Max's switch to Macs haha

What didn't?

• Does anyone care about our browser tests...? +++++
  • Why do we run these in so many environments?
    • Jon only focuses on the betalabs tests
    • Chris is supposed to disable test2 build, so this will only happen in beta and prod
    • Some tests cant even be run against enwiki
  • flakiness makes these less useful
  • consensus that the browser tests are valuable
    • Max points out that they are a significant drain
  • create vagrant role to make running these easier?

RSS Feed:

   https://wmf.ci.cloudbees.com/job/MobileFrontend-en.m.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org-linux-firefox/rssFailed
   https://wmf.ci.cloudbees.com/job/MobileFrontend-en.m.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org-linux-chrome/rssFailed

• Consensed: stick a card in Trello when there's a build failure [Jon]

• VisualEditor please shoot me now+++
  • Hard coordinating VE work and collaboration with VE team
  • take the VE team hostage, or have Max get all thugged out and threaten them
  • mini hackathon for dedicated focus time?
  • Roan is point person, but what do we do when we can't get ahold of him?
  • Consensed: arthur to followup with James F about our concerns and challenges; will reevaluate with both teams at conclusion of VE integration

• Testing non-user-facing/technical bugs for signoff
  • Consensed: Tech Lead will signoff, Product owner will indicate which cards should be signed off by tech lead

• Remote working has been trickier than it has been in the past.
  • Tough getting ahold of people on the team
  • Tough to pick up other folks' incompleted work, not clear what's been done
  • Very tough getting ahold of VE folks, particularly lately
  • Overall slowing us down a lot
  • Have to request the same thing multiple times from VE team; usually in person (hard to get ahold of in IRC sometimes - often times do not reply, even though they said we can bug them any time)
• Setting up citations/references was a headache
  • Vagrant yay (thanks Juliusz!)
  • supposed to have been documented, doesn't seem to be yet
• Implementation details of relocation to SF
  • Max still looking for a place to live
• Lots of uncertainty about Bahodir's visa
• bug warring with MZ +1
  • Don't feed the troll - just don't close his bugs immediately
  • If you start going in a back and forth spiral on BZ ever, let scrummaster and/or product owner know and they can manage the situation
• Designer changes have confused me
  • who has the final say?! if there's ever confusion/lack of clarity - pull in maryana
  • lots of ad-hoc conversations going on...
    • See 'rule of 3' https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Mobile_engineering/imported/Mobile_team/Mobile_web/Team_norms
• Miss card numbers from Mingle and prioritisation
• There are loads of minor style regressions in stable that have been bugging me and are not getting attention e.g. search page images and seem to be blocked on pushing typography to stable.+
• inconsistent UI between mobile/tablet and desktop VE designs caused some slowness
  • reconciling design between desktop/mobile, feels like mobile VE designed as a separate project
• Lack of a tester +
  • particularly for catching things not catchable by browser/unit tests