Community Tech/Retrospectives/2015-08-24

What has gone well?

 * It's nice to have Phab tickets to work off of, easy to pick one and go
 * Phab is not as light as trello, but seems better integrated
 * "Will learn to like phabricator"
 * Standups are good to keep on track
 * Like the frequency
 * Had time to look into interesting stuff and contribute to CoC discussions
 * Glad we have a manager and Team Practices support!
 * Security training was a lot of fun and useful
 * I have learnt a lot of new stuff - bots/gadgets as part of the research/spike cards
 * Communication with different teams as part of the spike card research process has gone well - I now know more people from more departments
 * Collaborating with TCB team (although not a whole lot yet)
 * Hoping to review TCB code and vice versa
 * "2 week cadence seems about right"
 * So far it seems like we all can agree on things and work with each other, which is good.
 * Interaction with the community has been positive so far
 * Getting feedback from community members and stakeholders in Phabricator has worked surprisingly well

What could have gone better?

 * We need to work out a process for Community Liaison support, so the Community Liaison knows how to best support the team.
 * Not enough work for this sprint +1
 * I didn't keep the spike card timeframe (half a day/a day) really in mind which led me to do fewer spike cards than I could have done. I got lost in trying out the actual extensions instead of just finding out stuff about them and leaving that there.
 * Feel a need for a meeting to discuss things more than the standups - find myself asking on IRC more
 * more 1:1s?
 * We could have had better acceptance criteria for the spike cards (i.e. more clear instructions about the expected outcomes of the investigations)
 * Would like to connect better with other dev
 * Weekly 1:1 are good, but maybe more?
 * Still stalled on SecurePoll stuff, partly because of feedback and partly because of inertia
 * Getting useful feedback from the Editing team has been a bit painful
 * Would be nice to have coding work
 * Would like to start 1:1s
 * "Feel a little lost in phabricator"
 * "Could not use phab productively without configuring my notifications"
 * I (Ryan) feel like I haven't been doing a lot of engineering managing (been doing more product mgmt)
 * Find the balance

What else is on your mind?

 * At standups, does it make sense to ask Johan, or should he just observe?

Action Items

 * Standups (chickens and pigs)
 * CL communication as part of workshops?
 * Backlog ran empty
 * Find way to have more communications outside of the standups (one-on-ones)
 * TImeboxing spikes: Worked well, or didn't?
 * Process for dealing with unfinished work from previous sprint
 * Communications w/Editing (and other) team

Retro the Retro

 * Hopefully next time less remote, but went well considering
 * Etherpad process went well
 * Possibly vote and deeper discussions at some point