Team Practices Group/Retrospectives/2015-06-05

The Team Practices Group (TPG) was dissolved in 2017.

TPG Retrospective - 5 June 2015

Action items from last retrospective (27 April 2015)

• ACTION: Grace to come up with proposal for codes, circulate with the team via Phab ticket [email subject line codes] DONE!

• ACTION: Experiment with this convention til next retrospective, though we reserve the right to bring it up sooner if things really aren’t working well [email subject line codes] DONE! keep the codes! (added [LOLZ])

• ACTION: Arthur to create a phab ticket documenting this issue and own finding this an owner [for RelEng collaboration on improving testing/reducing tech debt] DONE!

Big events since our last retrospective (27 April 2015)

• Published THC results

• TPG +2 !!!

• Hackathon

• Kanban discussions

• Grace acquired another team -Design Research

• Reorg fallout

• Arthur/KL -> Spotify trip

• Arthur/KL Scrum Gathering as speakers!

• MPL (Master Project List)

• SF meetups (after work)

• Phab charts, including Joel's work

• Deep VE process report (super health check)

• Changes to TPG regular meetings

• Kristen led week-long RelEng workshop

What's worked well?

• MB Excellent firehose support

• MB Immediately apparent that "there are no silly questions" is in effect

• TPG covered well while Arthur and Kristen were out

• Joel felt well-supported with help as needed for his team duties

• Kevin/Grace collaboration on getting THC 

• TPG getting into Kanban!

• Buddy format for onboarding +1

• Kevin’s help with posting THC results on wiki

• Kevin’s willingness to give Grace the 30 mins he had to review THC results and later follow up as fresh eyes on some of the language

• the email subject line tags!

• Joel’s VE interview doc and opportunity to comment on

• Joel’s knowledge of PMI cert renewal process helpful to Grace

• no major meltdowns during Arthur’s absence

• the SOP process discussions in various team meetings

• Philosophical conversations about Kanban

• Joel's emphasis on metrics, process docs, "why are we doing X?"

• Onboarding 2 people at once seemed to work well ("Nice to have a friend")

• RelEng workshop really worked well (having 2 people working together was great)

• Having 2 people working together at scrum gathering was also great

• not losing our shit about the reorg navigated reorg well, maintained our composure

• Speedy meetings

What hasn't?

• Now that we are bigger, our meetings are more focused on the work, and less on the social, philosophical++++++

• Not much visibility between verticals, despite being present. Could do cross-polination (informal chats about what's going on...qualitative, contextual) ++++

• • Maybe a SoS of scrummers...bringing collaboration cross-vertical impediments to each other

• • A chance to raise challenges and get group input

• • e.g. "Why are there no mobile devs in the Editing team?"

• • maybe regular unstructured meetings

Action! Weekly 1 hour long meeting, agenda to be coordinated [Arthur]

• Phabricator is not yet doing our bidding++++

• • Trying to get it to burnups has been frustrating

Fuzzy and Huge Action! Clarify requirements around Phabricator - add this to the backlog [Joel]

• We probably need some norms for how to use our mailing lists (esp. public vs. private) +++

Action! Start a thread about this [Kevin]

• Many ramp-up emails/channels for information +1

• • Disconnect between team onboarding expectations and actual documentation (or actions taken by other teams, such as IT)

• • Sometimes unclear whom to ask about what, beyond onboarding buddy
    
• Joel would like to be able to go to meetups, but hard to do after work

• Team Calendar frustrations (per Kevin's email thread)

• Booking conf rooms has problems: Often they are all full. 5th floor bookings don't get saved properly. Painful to move between floors

• • Although it is better than before the 5th floor opened

• Unclear expectation on reading all team THCs in prepartion of report

• MPL- I think that it’s good, but a bit of drama getting there

• reviewing Joel’s doc was on a tight deadline

• Joel is having to chase down some process stuff that is happening within his team and leadership, instead of them proactively inviting him in +

• Navigating public vs private notes, and how do you keep things consolidated when you have some things (eg notes) that should be private and others public?

Other questions/issues

• We should compare which mailing lists we are subscribed to

• We should compare how we each filter email (to learn from each other)

• Action! Joel is goign to put together a survey to captue what each of our teams is doing [JOEL]