Wikimedia Discovery/Meetings/Portal retrospective 2016-06-06

Covering whatever has happened related to the team since the last retro (2016-04-22)
 * Tomasz left :(
 * Moiz left :(
 * Katie joined :D
 * Sister project descriptive text test/rollout
 * Localized top-links production rollout

Review action items from before

 * Jan: Create phab task to wrap up doc of beta/demo/production sites
 * Task complete: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia.org_Portal_A/B_testing/dev_process
 * Jan: Do a post-mortem on what technical tasks actually took the longest time to complete.
 * not started yet; doesn't seem valuable right now. Dropping.
 * Deb: create rough mocks of some of the ideas for the future work and add to page on wiki for further discussion
 * Not gotten far. Held off some due to uncertainty.
 * Still plan to do, but with more focus on search results. (See action item below).
 * Deb: set up meeting with Creative Tech (Megan) to go over their rapid testing process (Deb, Jan, Mikhail)
 * Reached out; no response. Doesn't seem necessary. Dropping.
 * Deb: Create ticket for pushing successful lang links / localized phrase to production on portal
 * ✅ Was pushed into production last week. Announcement email is in the works.
 * Kevin: Consider some light form of retro after next A/B test
 * Have suggested, but wasn't a good time.
 * Will suggest again in the future. (See action item below).
 * Will suggest again in the future. (See action item below).

What went well?

 * Portal visitors session lengths brief report
 * Qualtrics survey run
 * Fewer responses than expected, but valuable
 * Did minor tweaks while it was active (it ran for a week)
 * localized languages coding - through teamwork, we got over 100+ translations for our production rollout last week
 * A/B Test and analysis for descriptive text for sister projects
 * ultimately pushed into production
 * Wrote documentation for portal page (readme, contributors doc, legal language stuff)

What could we improve?

 * Qualtrics survey bucketing
 * Timely code reviews (having to rely on other team mates)
 * Jan has had to +2 own code as a result. Not a best practice, but necessary in this situation.

What else should be noted?

 * Will run another Qualtrics survey this week with new bucketing schema and to get new folks that want to talk with us about portal things and search results (do people like having more results from different languages or be more accurate?)
 * Mikhail is going to be stretched even thinner due to non-Discovery work + hiring process picking up speed :(
 * Some uncivil responses to descriptive text production release announcement email
 * good support from Dan, Quim, others.
 * also really good support from CL (Chris) to help deal with the aggravating tone of some of the community response (a haven of calmness and wisdom) :)
 * Deb attended a Reading team offsite in early May - really good chances for collaboration
 * Kevin attended a few offsites as well - Search and TPG and Reading
 * Chris attended an offsite too!

Action Items

 * Chris: Update the "Project portals" page on Meta
 * Deb: create rough mocks of some of the ideas for the future work and add to page on wiki for further discussion
 * Deb: send email(s) on production releases and upcoming A/B tests
 * Kevin: Will continue to suggest A/B test retros at times
 * Kevin: Try to resolve code review delays
 * Kevin: Schedule one hour for next month's retro, since a half hour was too short