Wikimedia Apps/Team/iOS/Retrospectives/01-26-2017

Theme
Quarterly Planning

What went well

 * Good understanding of goals/priorities
 * Pretty efficient since there was a good road map already

What didn't work/Discussion

 * Not ideal but satisfactory
 * No negative feelings
 * There’s not a lot of change quarter to quarter
 * Seems like there’s a lot of leaking over
 * Pacing of having one quarter on feature and one quarter on maintenance worked well, the current pace of feature/quarter is causing the slide...
 * Big initial brainstorm populated roadmap and now it’s more a matter of moving things around, prioritizing them and squeezing them in where they make sense
 * WWDC reveals new tech which usually influences goals over the summer


 * Planning on reviewing the roadmap on the quarterly boundaries, checking that priorities are right and what we’re working on is still relevant, but previously it’s been done on an as-needed basis

How did this work with inter-team dependencies?

 * Maps search API dependencies were complete before work began (kind of)
 * Sounds like you don’t do some things cause there’s a dependency that you can’t rely on
 * API changes are not worrying. It’s the bigger things like Reading recommendation system, for example. The real dependency problems - ongoing service issues, not individual feature requests. The real thing - DR, Analytics, Marketing. Lack of infrastructural support doesn’t impact feature-level planning so much


 * Do you feel like you have to give teams a quarter’s notice?
 * Depends. It’s difficult with entirely new things (the thumbnails convo with the Reading Web). Bigger things are hard
 * Client teams take a lot of extra work.

Values to rate
Rate on a scale of 1 - 4

1 - High

2 - Moderate

3 - Low

4 - None

Honest 111

Empowering 221

Efficient use of time 222

Easy to follow 211

Outcomes 212

Visibility into other teams 333

Discussion

 * What info is missing?
 * Obscure - something lives on a wiki somewhere but there’s no central resource


 * Is the lack of visibility hurting you and your work?
 * The only thing that would hurt - being able to count on the other team to deliver/own a feature.


 * Is there anything that you wish you had a say on?
 * Wikidata discussions cause it’ll make it to iOS