Wikimedia Discovery/Meetings/Search retrospective 2017-01-25

Format
Glad/Sad/Mad: http://retrospectivewiki.org/index.php?title=Glad,_Sad,_Mad

Note that "mad" and "sad" don't have to mean literally angry or saddened. They can be used in a playful way as well.

The previous retrospective was a Team Health Check: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Discovery/Meetings/Search_team_health_check_2016-11-30

== '''Action items from the previous retro


 * Dan: work with apps team on full-text searching thing ✅ (Passed along info)
 * Dan: helping slow moving UI work move faster -- Seems to be going faster now, although not because of specific action by Dan

What has happened (since 2016-10-27)?
(Mostly pulled from Discovery/Status updates)
 * Inter-wiki search progress (http://sistersearch.wmflabs.org/ )
 * Closed many backlog tasks based on earlier work
 * EPIC: Review current ElasticSearch configuration, and use relevance lab to run tests to optimise the configuration to improve search result relevance
 * Implement a new fulltext query
 * Image search by file size  and and file type
 * BM25 is now enabled on the ten wikis with largest traffic.
 * Determined goals for the upcoming quarter
 * A workshop was held in Germany on advanced search syntax on Wikipedia
 * Load tests for cross-project searching were completed successfully.
 * We've put together a draft proposal for how to deal with the interaction of all the possible additional search options
 * Upgraded to Java 8
 * The time needed to restart our elasticsearch clusters is improving (T145065)
 * Holidays
 * Dev Summit/All Hands
 * Secondary search results are now possible over the API!
 * Finalized the second BM25 testing analysis
 * Finished writing up, summarizing, and recommending extensive changes to TextCat for language identification
 * Refactoring and cleanup, including moving phan to Jenkins
 * Guillaume investigating on I/O performance of elasticsearch servers
 * New elasticsearch and WDQS servers racked and (almost) configured
 * Katie asked us about how we manage quality
 * Created a new search/Learn to Rank (LTR) plugin (not prod-ready)
 * Various investigations of using dynamic bayessian networks for estimating relevance

What has made you mad?

 * Timeout issues with insource (regex search) in production. Still not fixed.
 * Google hangouts being stupid and slow+1 oh yes
 * (Google hangout is SOO much better than the proprietary solution I was used to)
 * My untameable hair
 * My webcam not working after OS update (mine too - had to get a new one from tech)
 * security patch breaking production - something is missing there in the process
 * Maybe we should nudge a bit to see if the process could be improved

What has made you sad?

 * Realizing there is so much I do not understand about disk IO
 * Mikhail was unable to attend today's retro
 * Yuri leaving Discovery (no longer staff; remaining as a volunteer)
 * Discussion on quality died too soon (was it wrapped up or just left hanging?)
 * This was from a question from Katie. Seems to have just been left hanging. Maybe we are happy?
 * Main focus of Katie may have been regarding other teams
 * Results of initial learning to rank experiments were only promising for popular queries (because it was trained on popular queries)
 * kerfluffle over Interactive Team (and timing of announce+vacation)
 * sticking my nose back in GC tuning (I already know this is going to eat time like crazy)
 * BM25 being delayed by technical difficulties (rightly so, but still disappointed)
 * Elasticsearch major upgrades still require full cluster restart
 * That's the ES plan, so not something we can necessarily fix
 * Somewhat weak attendance (by everyone else, not Discovery people) at the Discovery quarterly review... hard to interpret whether this is confidence or indifference in our work
 * Reading was more full
 * Probably doesn't even mean anything, honestly

What has made you glad?

 * Seeing people in person at the All Hands! +1 +1+1+1+1+1
 * A lot of good planning and designing stuff done @ dev summit & all hands
 * Eating in-n-out burger during the All Hands!+1 (note: In-n-Out != White Castle) (so true!)
 * Starting to understand *some* things about disk IO
 * Seeing the progress on the Labs instance for the front end/back end of the new sister search +1
 * talking with other PMs (outside of Discovery) about how to improve discovery of articles written in other langages (other than English)
 * The excellent conversation and documentation around solving problems and researching solutions (a.k.a. Trey's notes) +that!+1+1+1
 * https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Discovery/So_Many_Search_Options
 * https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:TJones_(WMF)/Notes/TextCat_Improvements#Final_Summary_.26_Recommendations
 * Knowing it is possible to restart an elasticsearch node in < 2 minutes
 * Big improvements in TextCat performance (on test data, but still)+1
 * ES 2 -> 5 doesn't seem to be as big a change as 1 -> 2
 * Quarterly review went well and the audience seemed excited about the new search stuff coming out in Q3+1
 * Getting more involved with the (entire) Search team again (Deb)+1
 * Dan's untamable hair

What else is on your mind?

 * Do we have longer-term maintenance plan for things interactive team has been doing (maps, graphoid, etc.)?

Discussion

 * Will Discovery continue to make sense if we have just 2 projects, one of which only has Stas working on it?
 * We still have portal and analysis as well
 * We're not aware of any thoughts or discussions about Discovery going away
 * Wasn't aware of stuff happening with the interactive team until the announcement
 * Doesn't directly affect my work
 * Says something about Discovery that one team is being disbanded and that isn't affecting the other teams. Low cohesion.
 * Not unique to Discovery. Even worse in reading, since they have a micro-vertical. Same in editing.
 * Being remote leads to hearing less gossip (not that gossip is a good thing)
 * These teams (search and interactive) were pretty siloed. Maybe we should look for ways for members to support other teams.
 * Remoteness is not actually a huge factor in these kinds of things, so this is a broader communication issue
 * People in the office might have noticed other people looking unhappy
 * Seemed like it happened so quickly
 * It had been brewing for months
 * Some had been documented
 * Communication is bidirectional. The interactive team didn't communicate out as much as they could have.
 * We used to have all-Discovery retrospectives every month
 * We stopped due to scheduling problems, retros getting longer, and more conversations not relevant to most people in the room
 * Maybe all-Discovery retros would have shared knowledge of some of the issues with the interactive team
 * If more of us had known about problems, how might we have helped?
 * We don't have a lot of people moving between teams or asking for help from other teams (which has pros and cons)
 * Do we have a plan for long-term maintenance of the work the interactive team was doing?
 * Plans are being made; discussions are active
 * We chose an imperfect early announcement rather than a later perfect one.

Action items

 * Stas: Look into (talking about) improving how security patches are handled
 * Kevin: Consider scheduling a work-centric version of the unmeeting
 * or maybe a hangout that's always on? or on for a period of time to talk about stuff?
 * Maybe every 4th unmeeting?
 * Maybe allow non-tech work conversations in unmeetings?