Wikimedia Apps/Team/Retrospectives/2015-09-02

This page contains a retro for iOS that was held a few days earlier than the date listed.

= ANDROID = September 2, 2015

Previous Retrospective Actions

 * Action! Team to handle more of it's own QA, and own decision on whether or not a task needs Elena's eyes
 * AB: Team could use budget to leverage specialist's guild DONE/ONGOING
 * Action! Let's talk about crash reporting [MAX to start an email thread] MICHAEL/DONE
 * Action! Weekly meeting with Design/PO to hash out sprint needs [MAX/DMITRY]

Worked Well

 * Good RESTBase service discussions.
 * Planning and announcing the sunsetting of GB active development
 * excellent contribs to RESTbase by Android team
 * fast turnaround on Google UX review
 * Dmitry and Max's shirts sync+

Worked Poorly

 * DB's bandwidth during strategy planning :(
 * Some of the RESTBase cards took longer than expected. For example, no localization framework in place and lots of new territory.
 * Max's Gmail filter's had a hard time refreshing and I missed all the gossip

Confuses Us

 * Swagger models vs Schema.org models. The latter is a huge database of well define API models, the former seem to be four examples. Am I missing something? Didn't get any clarity on this in the threads / code review.
 * Some of the RESTBase modules seem like they me replaced with NPM packages.
 * Still a little confused on why we have event logging AND hive. It seems like it should be one or the other.
 * Feel a little in the dark about the ultimate offering provided by RESTBase API. It seems like we should make a list of the endpoints, requests, and responses we want and work backwards. Feels a little too organic and not tied into something concrete.

Top three items, from "Worked Poorly" and "Confuses Us":
N/A

Action Items

 * Action! Question for Bernd and services folks: What do we want at the end of the day, a high level structure in mind for the API and the output of the service?
 * Action! Android team to meet and discuss to avoid reinventing the wheel, plan the structure [MICHAEL TO LIAISE W/SERVICES]

= iOS = August 28, 2015

Previous Retrospective Actions

 * Action! Calculate velocity now that we have the equivalent of three 2-week sprints of data [MAX] NOT YET READY
 * Clarify with team what is actually done-done, and what still needs to be addressed.
 * Action! Brian and Monte can come to Design Reviews [MAX]
 * Carve out some time for interaction issues for this meeting.
 * BG: We went!
 * Action! Break up Design review for iOS/Android [VIBHA/MAX] DONE
 * Action! Meeting notes from Design Review: why decisions were made around design [VIBHA/COREY] SKIPPED
 * When we do things, how long they take.
 * Action! Create a new column for "In QA"? [MAX] SKIPPED
 * Not gonna, since YAGNI once QA starts again & we get out of No QA Valley
 * Action! Email "Lack of repro steps or examples in Phab tickets/bugs" issue for email convo [MAX] DONE

Worked Well
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
 * BG: Visual tests!
 * MURD: I've been really liking these. One just caught a bug with a pull request I submitted today in fact
 * BG: Monte's new IRC moniker: Murd
 * Got clarification on QA for AB and JK
 * MURD: Things with 5.0 are beginning to look more polished
 * BG: integrating kaity more w/ the team! +1

Worked Poorly

 * BG: Broken tests (https://github.com/wikimedia/wikipedia-ios/pull/99) but Travis worked well in that it caught them!
 * BG: Feeling like we haven't had a "victory" in a couple months. Let's ship something soon!
 * Occasional "tire spinning" on tickets
 * BG: Dev pace (not sure what determining factor is here)? (number of new bugs in the app)
 * Tropical Shirt Fridays are not yet ratchet

Confuses Us

 * BG: Quality in 5.0. In a nutshell, when can we start requiring tests w/ patches & being more strict w.r.t. architectures etc.
 * Admittedly, probably just need to gel more as a team as we hit our stride
 * BG: Whether we would benefit from having more discrete tasks (e.g. recent section work)

Top three items, from "Worked Poorly" and "Confuses Us"
N/A

Actions Items

 * Action! Breakdown tickets larger than 3 points.
 * During Estimation, if things are looking large (5+) let's see if it can be made smaller
 * Action! Celebrate BETAs more!
 * Action! Get Corey a conductor's hat
 * Action! Start thinking about data-driven retros, how we can use data to make better decisions/experiments