Community Tech/Retrospectives/2015-09-28

Action items from last time

 * Working with community legacy code: super frustrating and hard to keep momentum going
 * Get everyone a copy of the book Kevin mentioned? (Kevin doesn't remember which book that was) (working with legacy code iirc)
 * Specific engineering manager/support when Ryan was gone would have been useful
 * Next time, have more clear expectations with Quim (To clarify, I think this action item talks about "technical" support and code review +1 Quim was awesome at providing general manager support)
 * ... in which case Quim is not the right person for covering Ryan on code review.
 * Could use more review/feedback
 * Hopefully already improved somewhat; will improve more with Danny
 * Has improved, looking forward to even more after the survey goes out
 * More interaction with the community would have been better for fixing the database reports
 * In the future, involve Johan (Community Liaison) early on
 * Post the retrospective notes on wiki

What has gone well?

 * Communication in general - team standups, one-on-ones. +1
 * Getting a PM! +1e6 +1
 * Actually finishing up a bunch of work, feels really good
 * More/faster code review, good
 * On-wiki communication around Citation Bot has gone really well
 * Pretty good amount of work available for this sprint, and actually got down to the "stuff Frances doesn't really want to work on" by the end, which is good for motivation to get that done!
 * Retrospectives are going well

What could have gone better?

 * NK: One of my investigations did not go so well - mainly timezone/remote issues, hard to get hold of people - not always easy even in similar TZ, usually needs to run in parallel with other work
 * Code of Conduct work has been really draining, would like to have more time/energy for personal learning/investigation, possibly more structured support for that
 * Likely to run at most through the end of Nov but maybe not much before then...
 * Even faster code review would be nice, +1 to more explicit GitHub processes
 * Hard to know when code is submitted in Github and ready for review. Maybe we should come up with specific conventions for pinging on this
 * Weekly 1:1s probably work better for me (FH)
 * Most of our work is English Wikipedia specific so far, some very specific!

What else is on your mind?

 * NK: I feel like we need a meeting to discuss the tasks from the last sprint and share lessons, from a technical point of view. Especially our Investigation tasks (which we squeeze into our sprint planning right now).
 * For easier copy&paste of these notes on wiki, each person should add their name to each note when relevant, i.e. "my investigations".
 * Hard to decide where to draw the line on closing epic tasks, like fixing database reports (but maybe Danny can help with this)
 * We will need to add more items to the backlog soon, but from where?

Action Items

 * Have follow-up conversations:
 * Most of our work is English Wikipedia specific so far
 * We will need to add more items to the backlog soon, but from where?
 * NK: I feel like we need a meeting to discuss the tasks from the last sprint and share lessons, from a technical point of view. Especially our Investigation tasks (which we squeeze into our sprint planning right now). Mailing list material? - Possibly! Take some time to write up mini-retrospectives on individual tasks?
 * GitHub workflows: we can do this on mailing list
 * How to handle delayed/nonexistent feedback especially when not possible to ping relevant people in real-time
 * Email! Email is ok, especially a heads-up re: an existing discussion elsewhere that needs input.
 * Brainstorm/discuss CoC handling with Kaldari/Quim/??
 * Post retrospective notes: Ryan

Retro the Retro

 * Seemed too short (try 90 minutes)
 * General format seemed to work