Readers/Web/Team/Retrospectives/2014-09-29

Eat Pray Love (9/15/14-9/29/14)
Notable events:
 * Baha starts!
 * Quarterly review
 * New team members announced (Sam, Rob, Joaquin)
 * Jon back

Absences:
 * Jon sick 9/26
 * Kaldari dentist

Points carried over from previous iteration: 5 Points attempted: 27 Points completed: 17 Velocity chart: https://docs.google.com/a/wikimedia.org/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AqEdtQuSLdAxdGF0Unlob2MtRmZTeU4tODJXbk9rQ1E&usp=drive_web#gid=1

Actions from last retrospective:
 * Come up with a schedule/timeline for UI standardization work in order to improve focus and organization [Tomasz] meeting every Thursday! DONE
 * Schedule a mid-sprint design review meeting to cut down on back-and-forth overhead [Kristen] OUTSTANDING
 * Pair on a story this sprint to enhance javascript knowledge [Jon/Max] ONGOING
 * Propose some structural changes to the PM meeting (product showcase, updates on priorities) in order to understand other teams' priorities and improve cross-team coordination (before things are released) [Maryana, Dan backup] Maryana proposed this, was well-received; will do demos

What's been working well?

 * Devs helping me out on IRC was great. One on one sessions with Jon and Max too.
 * We (are close to having) almost have no (actionable) bugs. That's great! :)
 * Quarterly review had a large attendance because we are awesome.
 * Florian is doing stories for us now from the must have column.
 * was helpful to have backlog groomed for volunteers/onboarding

What hasn't worked well?
Action! set up meeting to talk about this JON Action! make sure we have some tiny stories in sprint during onboarding period KRISTEN Action! email mobile-tech when a lightning deploy is happening
 * Felt Baha's onboarding could have been more structured. I hope he's not too lost :)
 * Seems to be some tension between wanting to get WikiGrok built fast/hacky for testing & wanting it to get built well/polished for reuse
 * getting balance between speed and quality right (same as above really - on a shared codebase we need to do a better job of following patterns to be more sustainable (maybe better to build prototypes on-wiki?)
 * alpha becomes more "standalone"? not integrated with other parts of the code
 * design can get involved doing more prototypes?
 * on wiki js?
 * bad estimations in terms of wikigrok stuff
 * NOTE: estimations were based on being hacky
 * I wasn't able to work on a feature/story. Only bug fixes.
 * Lightning deploy wasn't communicated and caused confusion between Kaldari and I.
 * Still want to make sure design signs off before card is done
 * Design will add THEIR FACES to the cards they care about

What confuses?

 * How we onboard people
 * How we are going to cope with 3 new additional hires in a month :)
 * Large codebase without a well written documentation
 * Echo had a technical writer who outlined stuff and engineers filled in details
 * technical writer as an "ask"?
 * Action! found out if WMF going to replace Sumana (bug Robla) KALDARI
 * Action! Make some cards to document code Baha BAHA
 * VE team has a Jenkins job that complains if you don't add documentation
 * Action! do soem docuamntaiton on hygiene day TEAM
 * Where do we see quarterly goals?
 * haven't decided yet, will discuss tomorrow!
 * https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/2014-15_Goals#Mobile