Readers/Web/Team/Retrospectives/2014-10-14

= 14 October 2014 =

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (9/29/14-10/14/14)
Notable events:
 * Sam and Rob start!
 * Kristen and Baha in SF!
 * Quarterly planning
 * Team health check
 * Indigenous People's Day 10/13
 * Met w/Lydia/WikiGrokage
 * New hires! [Joaquin]

Absences:
 * Kristen Out 10/10
 * Kaldari Dentist (new grill) 10/9
 * Rob Out 10/8 (prenatal thingy)

Points carried over from previous iteration: N/A Points attempted: N/A Points completed: N/A, 10 Velocity chart: https://docs.google.com/a/wikimedia.org/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AqEdtQuSLdAxdGF0Unlob2MtRmZTeU4tODJXbk9rQ1E&usp=drive_web#gid=1

Actions from last retrospective:
 * Schedule a mid-sprint design review meeting to cut down on back-and-forth overhead [Kristen] DONE
 * Set up meeting to talk about ways to get prototypes out for testing quickly in a "standalone" environment JON
 * Make sure we have some tiny stories in onboarding sprints in addition to bugs KRISTEN/MARYANA
 * Email mobile-tech when a lightning deploy is going to happen LIGHTNING DEPLOYERS
 * Find out if WMF going to replace Sumana as tech writer (bug Robla) KALDARI
 * there's a req out for senior tech writer, yay! Dev processes and core things that new developers struggle with
 * Make some cards to document code BAHA
 * Do some code documentation on hygiene day TEAM
 * code won't get merged until documented like VE?
 * Kaldari -1s if not enough documentation
 * Add to Jenkins? Comment Nazi bot!
 * Agree to document appropriately before submission

What's been working well?

 * we ran out of actionable bugs.
 * having so many more awesome people all of a sudden +1000 and a new hire!
 * Being onsite and being able to work on a bug with a designer +1
 * the titles of these sections
 * Iteration naming
 * kristen! :D +1
 * Starting to get more help/attention from analytics
 * Max seems more optimistic about wikidata extension (he's not running away screaming..yet). yaaaaaay -2 (from Max)

What hasn't worked well?

 * onboarding (?) -1-1
 * image quality onboarding task :-) :(
 * Our old policy of having tech lead sign off on technical/non-user-facing bugs – esp. during a tech debt sprint & with our big new team, this doesn't scale very well. Should explore other alternatives (immediate sign-off, getting someone else to sanity check your work, self-test, etc.)
 * if a bug is resolved in Bugzilla, we can consider it signed off on?
 * whoever merges it signs off on it (for tech tasks)
 * slow to get ui standardisation stuff merged
 * we lost kaldari to lots of meetings+
 * there's a lot of outstanding (!!!) code review and sign off+
 * WD data model (or a lack of it) +++++
 * the way we need to query WD is not performant (for production use); what we're doing right now is brittle
 * data is outdated
 * we have started a list of asks with input from Max and Kaldari; will have to escalate to Damon, Lila, et al MARYANA
 * Maryana might pull more people in as things evolve
 * we're keeping WD folk aware of our use cases
 * Worst case scenario, get in to WD code? mostly back end work tho (Sam can help!)
 * Moiz: concerned about lack of back-end skill on team; Joaquin is "a backender"
 * Current plan: focus on demonstrating use cases to illustrate need for a robust WD
 * Action! Send out list of WD issues MARYANA


 * Code reviews should be done quickly otherwise rebasing will cause unnecessary work ++
 * be annoyying and ping people if patch touches lots of other things
 * Lots of context switching ++
 * we have lots of people but not enough +2ers – somebody needs to help me reprovision all my Vagranty things so I can become one >:D +++
 * Action! Help Baha become a +2er! Review my review dawg! BAHA, TEAM
 * More tests
 * sam's choice of colo[u]r -1+
 * sam's and jon's spelling of colo[u]r and gray
 * Sam & Rob not being onsite :( Come visit usssss!!! -- babies! bring the babies (or soon-to-be babies. or whatever)
 * I'm coming in November yaaay I need dates

What confuses?

 * what do we do with productive people when we don't have bugs +
 * Are we really going to be able to have 6/7 devs working on WikiGrok at once? (for future) ++++++
 * covered some of this above
 * keep it light, prototypes outside of Mobile Frontend (eg mobile.js, gadgets).
 * Kaldari would love to download his mind in to remote peeps brains (there's a card for this!) KALDARI
 * See Jon's action above
 * lack of instruction on bugs under need analysis (at least for noobs)
 * wikigrok's code (and Labs) is (not)? amazing
 * Does Sam ever get to sleep? No! :( :D
 * Where's Dartar and Ironholds?
 * whether things that happen at ferry friday realy should stay at ferry friday