Readers/Web/Team/Retrospectives/2014-07-14

Yolo Swag Bird (6/16/2014-6/30/2014)
Notable events: * Jon joins Flow team Absences: * 6/16 - 6/17 Arthur vacation * 6/23 - Arthur sick * 6/23 - 6/27 Kaity vacation * 6/25 - 6/27 Arthur @ OS Bridge * 6/30 Max sick

Points carried over from previous iteration: 5 Points attempted: 22 Points completed: 12

Zedonk (6/30/2014-7/14/2014)
Notable events: * Quarterly/annual planning (7/1 - 7/2) * July 4 holiday Absences: * 7/3 Juliusz * 7/3 - 7/9 Maryana Points carried over from previous iteration: 10 Points attempted: 23 Points completed: TBD, ~5 - 13

What's been working well?

 * Getting rid of crufty stuff in the code, getting ready to get rid of other crufty stuff in alpha/beta
 * Lots of volunteer patches from Florian, much of it has been merged - integrating volunteer development!
 * Annual/quarterly planning went really well; quickly and smoothly coalesced around common goal
 * our frontend coding task will be used across teams
 * Shayar said that Trevor's idea is good! (redo skin framework RFC)
 * We're hiring Kristen
 * Arthur running interference on QA/browser test woes :)

What hasn't worked well?
Action! Kaldari to organize a meeting with relevant players to come up with concrete next steps on moving forward the template RFC conversation
 * No clear direction on infrastructure side of MobileFrontend ++++
 * ultimate goal - get more of MF into core, MF working as a normal skin, working out of the box in MW w/o having to set up extension
 * UI standardization stuff may impact the direction of this, although we've already moved a bunch of stuff to mediawiki.ui - would be a shame to throw it away
 * blocked on resolving the templating conversation
 * could help work on mantle? but may not be worthwhile...
 * logical next step: need to have a conversation with trevor, gabriel, and ideally someone from the mobile web team to keep moving this conversation forward
 * blocked on resolving the skin framework conversation (Trevor's RFC)
 * IndexPager needs to be rewritten (esp for Minerva on desktop), perhaps before adding any new one-off SpecialPages
 * We're in a holding pattern until skin and template RFCs are resolved; Max focussing on HHVM stuff for the next while so we'll need to hold off on IndexPager changes

Action! After bugs are triaged, Maryana/Juliusz update the priority of the bug in bugzilla
 * Lots of volunteer patches that require fixes or follow ups++++
 * volunteer work not necessarily lining up with team's priorities?
 * how much time should we spend on dealing with volunteer contributions?
 * how do we prioritize managing volunteer contributions relative to our other team priorities?
 * Jon was really active with code review/working with volunteers, Juliusz has been doing some of this lately
 * We all agree that supporting volunteer contributions is important and valuable
 * Limit how much time we spend reviewing patches?
 * Clearer bug triaging workflow?
 * How do other feature-oriented teams deal with this? no one knows!

Action! Juliusz to get Jon's pre-commit review-nag hook working again


 * browser test stuff feels like it's gotten worse++
 * Dan Duvall will be pairing with Juliusz to work on MF tests on Vagrant


 * Some patches hard to review (PageImages, I don't know the code base, there are no tests)
 * MediaWiki sucks wrt images in tests
 * need moar devssssss +
 * quite a few things to work on outside of mobile (standardazing tech task, standardizing UI)
 * Max low on Mobile-specific backendy things to do+
 * Who should be doing code review for non-MF extensions that we rely on, particularly the ones maintained by Max when Max made code contributions that need review?
 * in particular: PageImages, TextExtracts, FeaturedFeeds
 * sometimes items in 'awaiting final code review' do not have a link to the related patchset in gerrit

Parking Lot

 * Max wants to be involved in at least one front-end interview cycle (Kaldari said he'd make sure to pull Max in to the next one)