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 ✅
 * Clear blockers more quickly/frequently -- e.g. designate a scrummaster, or hold more frequent standups. ✅ (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 ✅ (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 ✅
 * (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 ✅
 * (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

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)