Wikimedia Discovery/Retrospective 2015-07-13

Review of previous retrospective action items

(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)
- https://office.wikimedia.org/wiki/Contact_list
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:

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:

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:

How can we interact more with the community?

Retro of retro

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

Voted up

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

Circulate retrospective etherpad ahead of time (Kevin)