Readers/Web/Team/Retrospectives/2014-09-15

Dirty Dancing (9/02/2104-9/15/14)
Notable events: *Jon back! * juliusz is gone(?) Absences: *Kaldari sick 9/10

Points carried over from previous iteration: 5

Points attempted: 21

Points completed: 16

Velocity chart: https://docs.google.com/a/wikimedia.org/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AqEdtQuSLdAxdGF0Unlob2MtRmZTeU4tODJXbk9rQ1E&usp=drive_web#gid=1

Actions from last retrospective

 * Clarify design resources for mobile web team with Jared [Kaity and Moiz]
 * Kaity will be our secondary designer; new senior designer coming in Nov-Dec
 * Jared will talk to Maryana about this
 * Help for front-end code review bottlenecks [Max volunteered, yay!]
 * Clarify timeline, end-date, and deliverables for templating work, and the process for getting there [Kaldari talk to Tomasz]
 * Understand the balance btw UI/frontend standardization & building new features and allocate resources appropriately (related to above) [Maryana]
 * Standardization scope: forms, icons, skins, OOJS...(Tomasz will send some mail about this)
 * Jon has made good progress
 * What are implications of OOJS work on mobile web team? Make use of OOJS a core practice for mobile web team
 * Jon: should focus on things that deliver user value, not for sake of standards; but if we can "bridge the gap" we should do the right thing
 * Encompasses template standardization

Follow-on actions from previous retrospective:
 * Attend QA quarterly review to bring up Vagrant and beta labs issues [Juliusz]
 * Done, see Juliusz's email
 * Keep pushing on resourcing of editing-related work [Maryana]
 * Think we're OK, haven't heard from James
 * Kaity is working with Editing team, and things seem to be going well
 * They are ordering mobile testing devices :-)

What's been working well?

 * I haven't felt completely out of the loop since you guys use mailing lists well.
 * Flow, Echo are now more MobileFrontend friendly.
 * You guys have no idea how good it is to be on an organised team (or maybe you do :P).
 * Interviewing/finding candidates

What hasn't worked well?

 * mediawiki ui changes need consensus from Growth team and Shahyar. It's hard to get their focus and agreement on lots of these things which is going to make standardisation efforts harder. We need to find ways to get them working closer to us.
 * no PM or tech lead makes getting agreement and direction harder
 * UI standardization mainly conissted of poeple aleady allocated to other areas
 * Erik asked Tomasz to be a wrangler
 * A schedule/timeline might help people get more organized [TOMASZ]
 * had more back-and-forth on design stuff during the sprint than we should have & as a result didn't get in-line WikiGrok merged as early as we could have..
 * Apps team does a design review meeting to sync up on design
 * Something in the middle of the sprint will be good [Kristen]
 * Also would like to be thinking 2 sprints ahead
 * Strong maps candidate was rejected without consultation with tech people [Max/Tomasz can chat about this as needed]

What confuses?

 * J̩̮a҉̯̖͖̫͍v̵̱͎̗̫̟͕͓àSc̷̜̘̟̫̤̳̲ri̶p̩̬͢t̫̺̰̲̤̘̖


 * Max still feel like a monkey that presses buttons randomly; still doesn't have the full vision
 * Pair on a story this sprint [Jon/Max]
 * How we can work closer with Flow, Growth, VE with their different team practices
 * obervations from flow team: communication was challenging and practices seemed ad hoc
 * scrum of scrums has helped from technical perspective
 * PM problem? they are different types of projects (long term v younger projects); can we get things on a roadmap? There is a Flow roadmap as of a few days ago
 * understanding priorities better would help
 * cross-team coordination is lacking: design, eng...does product bind them together?
 * PM status meeting is not effective to communicate dependecies/duplications; make more showcasey
 * Product showcase: update about priorites, what's happening (rotating?) [Maryana, Dan backup]
 * things that we can catch before they are released
 * the team practices IRC channel is available to discuss team practices issues


 * Kaity- reminder: make sure to check w/design before signing off