Wikimedia Discovery/Meetings/Maps retrospective 2016-06-06

Covering whatever has happened related to the team since the last retro (2016-04-20)

NOTE: Julien wasn't able to attend, as he was at a design function.

Review action items from before

 * Tomasz will ensure long term plans are appropriately communicated
 * Yuri will create a longer-term roadmap/vision
 * Mention of maps and graphs on Annual Plan - https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2016-2017/revised#Program_2:_Maintain_and_improve_content_discovery
 * Yuri: Tactical (shorter-term) planning
 * ✅. We have goals for Q4 (Apr-June) and Q1 (July-Sept)
 * Tomasz will talk with Volker to check on getting help from editing team on maps
 * Some conversations. No tangible progress.
 * Ideally would get code reviews, but not blocked. Dropping.
 * Guillaume: Poke Mark as needed until we get hardware
 * But note that eqiad hardware not yet racked, work is ongoing, last update from Friday 3rd
 * Guillaume to start reading and writing documentation and ask questions
 * ✅ (not much writing done yet, a couple of diagrams that I don't really know where to put)
 * ✅ (not much writing done yet, a couple of diagrams that I don't really know where to put)

What went well?

 * Great visual improvements thanks to Julien (gradual, more to do)
 * Have gained better understanding of what is needed (user and tech requirements)
 * Structured data storage
 * UI elements
 * Historical maps
 * Styles / map layouts
 * Implemented most of the Wikivoyage customizations
 * It's in test; hope to switch production very soon

What could we improve?

 * Multiple GeoData regressions on Elastic Search upgrade, gotta pay more attention to stuff other than what we're currently working on
 * More integration tests would help
 * Elastic search is lower priority than maps work for now
 * Guillaume is probably the bottleneck of the team at this point (at least it feels a bit like it). I would love to be the one pushing the team faster, but not happening at the moment.
 * Less shared responsibility on maps (compared to cirrus/wdqs) so Guillaume is taking more on
 * Tight security restrictions contribute to this bottleneck (ops doesn't want to open it up more)
 * Full admin rights for maps devs might not be palatable, but custom rights can be time-consuming and error-prone
 * setting up new maps server is taking forever, and not working out of the box (it should)
 * Could Max help with puppet and other setup? Yeah, but depends on priorities.
 * Guillaume should prioritize and structure the task; bring in Max/Yuri when it would help.
 * As a team, we should meet more often in shorter meetings (rather than fewer longer)

What else should be noted?

 * We should summarize what we gained from the conversation with folks around interactive maps and how that will shape the engineering work going forward
 * Not sure when eqiad hardware will be ready (but seems to be moving forward)
 * Team prefers to stick with half an hour for these retros, rather than going to an hour

Action Items

 * Yuri: create a longer-term roadmap/vision
 * Max: investigate making puppet manifests more self-sufficient
 * Guillaume: upload diagrams to commons
 * Guillaume: restart conversations about opening up rights on production boxes
 * Kevin: Create phab task to improve Elastic Search GeoData tests
 * Kevin: Send email reminder about meeting more frequently but shorter
 * Chris: write a draft of "what we learned" from interactive maps conversations