Team Practices Group/Retrospectives/2015-06-05

TPG Retrospective - 5 June 2015

Action items from last retrospective (27 April 2015)

 * ACTION: Grace to come up with proposal for codes, circulate with the team via Phab ticket [email subject line codes] DONE!


 * ACTION: Experiment with this convention til next retrospective, though we reserve the right to bring it up sooner if things really aren’t working well [email subject line codes] DONE! keep the codes! (added [LOLZ])


 * ACTION: Arthur to create a phab ticket documenting this issue and own finding this an owner [for RelEng collaboration on improving testing/reducing tech debt] DONE!

Big events since our last retrospective (27 April 2015)

 * Published THC results


 * TPG +2 !!!


 * Hackathon


 * Kanban discussions


 * Grace acquired another team -Design Research


 * Reorg fallout


 * Arthur/KL -> Spotify trip


 * Arthur/KL Scrum Gathering as speakers!


 * MPL (Master Project List)


 * SF meetups (after work)


 * Phab charts, including Joel's work


 * Deep VE process report (super health check)


 * Changes to TPG regular meetings


 * Kristen led week-long RelEng workshop

What's worked well?

 * MB Excellent firehose support


 * MB Immediately apparent that "there are no silly questions" is in effect


 * TPG covered well while Arthur and Kristen were out


 * Joel felt well-supported with help as needed for his team duties


 * Kevin/Grace collaboration on getting THC


 * TPG getting into Kanban!


 * Buddy format for onboarding +1


 * Kevin’s help with posting THC results on wiki


 * Kevin’s willingness to give Grace the 30 mins he had to review THC results and later follow up as fresh eyes on some of the language


 * the email subject line tags!


 * Joel’s VE interview doc and opportunity to comment on


 * Joel’s knowledge of PMI cert renewal process helpful to Grace


 * no major meltdowns during Arthur’s absence


 * the SOP process discussions in various team meetings


 * Philosophical conversations about Kanban


 * Joel's emphasis on metrics, process docs, "why are we doing X?"


 * Onboarding 2 people at once seemed to work well ("Nice to have a friend")


 * RelEng workshop really worked well (having 2 people working together was great)


 * Having 2 people working together at scrum gathering was also great


 * not losing our shit about the reorg navigated reorg well, maintained our composure


 * Speedy meetings

What hasn't?

 * Now that we are bigger, our meetings are more focused on the work, and less on the social, philosophical++++++


 * Not much visibility between verticals, despite being present. Could do cross-polination (informal chats about what's going on...qualitative, contextual) ++++


 * Maybe a SoS of scrummers...bringing collaboration cross-vertical impediments to each other


 * A chance to raise challenges and get group input


 * e.g. "Why are there no mobile devs in the Editing team?"

Action! Weekly 1 hour long meeting, agenda to be coordinated [Arthur]
 * maybe regular unstructured meetings
 * Phabricator is not yet doing our bidding++++

Fuzzy and Huge Action! Clarify requirements around Phabricator - add this to the backlog [Joel] Action! Start a thread about this [Kevin]
 * Trying to get it to burnups has been frustrating
 * We probably need some norms for how to use our mailing lists (esp. public vs. private) +++
 * Many ramp-up emails/channels for information +1


 * Disconnect between team onboarding expectations and actual documentation (or actions taken by other teams, such as IT)


 * Sometimes unclear whom to ask about what, beyond onboarding buddy
 * Joel would like to be able to go to meetups, but hard to do after work


 * Team Calendar frustrations (per Kevin's email thread)


 * Booking conf rooms has problems: Often they are all full. 5th floor bookings don't get saved properly. Painful to move between floors


 * Although it is better than before the 5th floor opened


 * Unclear expectation on reading all team THCs in prepartion of report


 * MPL- I think that it’s good, but a bit of drama getting there


 * reviewing Joel’s doc was on a tight deadline


 * Joel is having to chase down some process stuff that is happening within his team and leadership, instead of them proactively inviting him in +


 * Navigating public vs private notes, and how do you keep things consolidated when you have some things (eg notes) that should be private and others public?

Other questions/issues

 * We should compare which mailing lists we are subscribed to


 * We should compare how we each filter email (to learn from each other)


 * Action! Joel is goign to put together a survey to captue what each of our teams is doing [JOEL]