Mobile web/Etherpad/Retrospective-2013-11-12

Mobile Web retrospective, 2013-11-12 Etherpad: http://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/MobileWeb-Retrospective-20131112

What's been working/should we continue doing?

 * Being on the deployment train
 * Alpha/beta promotion/demotion+
 * visual editor spikes - rob moen
 * good learning about editors
 * Good iteration names+1 and the fun part of naming them+
 * team communication (including remote folks)
 * being able to merge quite large changes in reasonable time in gerrit
 * progressively cleaning up the codebase

What hasn't been working/should we stop doing/should we do better?
Action: Chat with QA, Juliusz, and Tomasz about coordinating a long workshop for the mobile team. Make documentation a condition for this [Arthur]
 * QA (esp. Nearby tests)++++
 * making it easier to run tests on ANY instance?
 * Juliusz was supposed to do a TDD tutorial, hasn't gotten around to it
 * ANYBODY should be able to write tests, it shouldn't just be Michelle
 * Pool collective knowledge into documentation around testing
 * Have a day-long workshop around testing?
 * Can we make this non-remote e.g. everyone in the office to make it easier
 * Book on Cucumber and related tools: http://pragprog.com/book/achbd/the-rspec-book
 * Documentation + links to documentation for tools we use

Action: Get back to posting git logs pre-deployment [Michelle]
 * Being on the deployment train++++
 * Long waits until things change/get fixed++
 * Confusion around what is currently deployed and where

Action: Whole team polices making sure we're actually using LDs for emergencies Deployer responsible for: * creating calendar invite for deployment * making sure people who need to be present are added to the invite and aware that they need to be available during LD
 * IRC attendance especially around LD times++++
 * sometimes code not merged by LD and no one is around to merge!
 * who should actually be around during LD? patch author, product owner, subject area specialist, deployer
 * deployer responsible for creating calendar invite and alerting necessary participants
 * LD for emergencies - we have been using them for non-emergency things

Action: Add this to team norms [Arthur]
 * Good practice to be on IRC all the time, or at least as often as possible


 * Velocity seems slower than usual+
 * The whole diff spike
 * A desire for everything to be perfect first time round
 * Designer confusion - product / designers not coordinating as well as could
 * meeting meetings meetings
 * Code review backlog
 * Broken patches being sometimes submitted to gerrit
 * can do a better job of making learning actionable++

Any outstanding quesitons/concerns?

 * how do iterations fit into roadmap?
 * Kenan will tie things back to the roadmap during itertation planning meetings
 * how things like BetaFeatures and MediaWiki UI should take my time, and Limn graphs, and AB tests analysis
 * can we get/do we need more pepple able to review Limn graphs - bottle neck
 * do a brownbag!

Action items from last time

 * visibility of alpha/beta features - some we just forgot about - Alpha as a place for features to bitrot+++++++ [Jon]
 * bingle could do more for me - resolving duplicates, backlogging enhancements, transitions +++ [Arthur]
 * Didn't QA editing across projects - generally QA'ing across many projects that are not enwiki +++ [Michelle]
 * communicating with ops / cross team working +++ [Arthur/Erik M]
 * Documentation is hard to find [Kaldari]