Wikimedia Apps/imported/Retrospective-November 13 2014

= Previous Retrospective Actions =


 * Finish reviewing Nearby blog post [Dan] DONE
 * Concerns about the robustness of Wikidata given its importance to mobile work was a major concern. Related actions include: DONE
 * Continue to express these concerns to Directors, Damon, Lila
 * Review Maryana's "Asks" doc: https://docs.google.com/a/wikimedia.org/document/d/1g94w8kouuyQncmixTzQtWpYhN2p42lJ1irN6kxZVoOM/edit#
 * Begin building app features with Wikidata to illustrate pain points and use cases
 * Dan will be talking to Lydia and Daniel about our impact on WikiData

= Worked Well =
 * Spending time with Dmitry and Bernd on tweaking and finessing <3
 * Apple releases went faster than expected \o/
 * Time off! :) +1
 * Velocity of Android app progress +1
 * Poaching code from android for iOS - queries for search improvements
 * Dan's time allocation, I'm pretty much 95% on apps right now +1
 * Building the app roadmap
 * Lead images look awesome! +1!+1+1+1
 * Using wikidata short descriptions for all the things
 * Wikidata integration in 3 places
 * Alpha builds working again.

= Worked Poorly =
 * iOS data refactor still bogged down for a while, but making better progress once the integration started
 * Need moar iOS developers! +1
 * Moar QA for Android app; need time to let code gelatinize
 * Rummana and Elena will be starting soon (1 FTE total)
 * Dan + Kristen meeting with R, E, and Greg Monday to talk about how working with the team will go
 * Specialist's Guild can provide backup QA (24 hr turnaround!); will give them next release candidate
 * Release process: making release candidates ahead of time (we'll need to get better/more regimented at this to coordinate with QA peeps)
 * Tomasz can help with this?
 * Need more time for bug fixes/cleanup. Spending around 3 days on that at beginning of sprint on Android.
 * more eyes on the code! Another Android engineer?
 * More blog posts
 * Desire for us to socialize our work more
 * Action! Blog post for lead images [DMITRY]
 * Action! Blog post for wikidata descriptions for search [DAN]
 * Socializing Nearby and all the new stuff we have in the pipeline (what's our story)
 * Moiz thinks we should have somethign really meaty before showing off to the world

= Confuses Us =
 * Objective C. +1 Swiftly swift!
 * Dan will be doing some follow-up on this
 * How is iOS going to catch up without additional resources for the next few months +1 let's get some hiring done hopefully!
 * Material design; what does it mean and when are we going to do it?
 * How are we going to translate the design principles in to engineering tasks?
 * Full redesign or just "materialist approach" to what's coming up?
 * Action! Vibha will send around links and possibly set up a meeting to dive in this more [Vibha]
 * the new iOS 8 TestFlight is confusing to use so far
 * will try with external beta testers to iron out the kinks
 * still unsure of Wikidata's capacity to handle our load (may be a blocker for all the features we want to implement)
 * End of year sprint and dates [Kristen]