Wikimedia Discovery/Meetings/Analysis retrospective 2016-08-08

Format

This retrospective was conducted using the "Five finger retrospective" format.

Action Items from last month

• Dan: Make sure Deb & Mikhail confer on onboarding tasks/documentation before new hire arrives
  •  Done
• Dan: Announce Deb's new position re: analysis
  •  Done
• Dan: Follow up with upper mgmt about going through proper channels
  • Didn't happen, but a related conversation did happen
  • May still be an issue worth pursuing
  • Dan will follow-up with Deb offline about this

What happened since the last retro (July 7)

• WE HAVE A CHELSY
• Investigated spike in no-actions on portal dashboard and it turned out the problem was past Mikhail (T139109)
  • Dan knows that feel
• Mikhail completed a review of the language-identification A/B test (using TextCat)
• Mikhail nearly completed a review of Wikipedia Portal deployments "historical" data (is it still historical if it's since Nov 2015?) YAY!
• Mikhail updated geographical breakdown to filter out larger countries on portal dashboard
• Mikhail updated all dashboards to have better annotations, include better date range selectors, and other fixes (e.g. http://discovery.wmflabs.org/wdqs/ )
• Mikhail released a prototype app for checking out which WM sites and which languages of Wikipedia users go to from Portal  ( https://bearloga.shinyapps.io/portal2sites/ )
• Kevin added a "have a retro" step to the standard A/B test process (will take effect for the next one)
  • This will be available for all A/B tests (not just Analysis Team)

Thumb: Thumbs up--something that went well

• WE HAVE A CHELSY
  • Hanging out with Chelsy & Dan in LA was a lot of fun
  • Mikhail found out that Chelsy & Dan are brutal UNO players  :-)
• Deb's product ownership of analysis+(Thanks!!)
• Mikhail has been superb at handling the variety of analysis requests from Search, Portal and Maps teams (Aw shucks :P)
• Dan continues to hear remarks such as "Discovery is awesome at A/B tests" and similar
• Dan got a totally random email from someone in Wikimedia UK for the external referrers dashboard because he was thinking about using indirectly it for a project he's working on. Our dashboards are awesome! :-)
• Mikhail got a "http://discovery.wmflabs.org/ is awesome and I love it" from new hire Melody Kramer

Index finger: The ONE thing you want people to know (about how this team has functioned over the last month)

• WE HAVE A CHELSY
• We continue to get out-of-band requests and continue to have to decline them. This problem isn't really fixing itself. But how do we fix it?
  • talk softly and carry a big stick

Middle finger: Something that did not go well

• Reduced capacity due to only having one analyst
• Mikhail was out for a couple of days due to oral surgery (we missed him!)

Ring finger: Something about relationships--within the team, between teams, other

• WE HAVE A CHELSY
• The Maps Team believe that their KPIs are poorly defined and their data collection is subpar, and want to fix it somehow
  • Includes a weird Maps event logging outage ( reported in https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T141456 )
  • This will include adding additional dashboard features, probably
  • No action items here: Dan and Katie are working on this, and will let you know as the situation evolves

Pinky: A little thing that would be easy to overlook (or was overlooked)

• Should we change the "email Dan" to "email Deb" if you have any questions on the dashboards?
  • public static String PRODUCT_OWNER = "Deb";
  • System.out.println("Email " + PRODUCT_OWNER);
  • //tl;dr: yes :-p
  • File a task for Chelsy to do? GREAT IDEA!+1
    • I'll do it

Action items

• Dan: send out an intro email to WMFall welcoming Chelsy to the team :)
• Dan: Follow up with Deb about interactions with upper management
• Deb: Create a task to update the dashboard contact info