Growth/Growth 2014/Retrospectives

This document records Agile retrospectives for the Growth team in Wikimedia Engineering. These are rough, unedited notes for the most part. Growth retrospectives happen every two weeks the day after an iteration of work (i.e. a sprint) ends.

May 20 2014
Reminder: we will publish these notes at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Growth/Retrospectives so speak up if there is something you don't want publicly shared.


 * What should we keep doing? What went well?:
 * Pinging people outside of Trello about immediate blockers. (This should include the standup too.)
 * Having retrospectives. ;-)


 * What should we start doing? (New ideas and ways to improve.):
 * Accounting for flight time when noting which meetings we (Aaron) will miss.
 * Adding more stuff to the sprint, so we don't move things in from backlog.
 * Assign cards evenly to everyone at the start of the sprint.
 * When an A/B test is about to launch, must have a plan for what we're going to work on while it's running and in analysis.
 * When we're about to launch and we have any complications/questions/doubts, we should just do a Hangout to talk about it, rather than try to catch up asynchronously
 * Brief architecture meetings up front will help with the same issue above, i.e. talk about how we're going to tackle non-trivial items.
 * Aaron states his assumptions about instrumentation of schemas, e.g. client side versus server side.
 * Cards at the top of the backlog need to have clear definitions of done.
 * First thing: Go over past retrospective notes to say what we were gonna change.


 * What should we stop doing? (Things that blocked progress.):
 * Starting a sprint without a clear product goal/thing of value to deliver to users. This time we just pulled random stuff from the backlog. We're still getting good stuff done, but it's less clear what the priorities are.

May 7 2014

 * What should we keep doing? What went well?
 * Adding cards for only essential items mid-sprint
 * Decomposing cards. There was a larger number but we actually got more done even though.
 * Strong levels of communication in the team. It's good having a smaller tight-knit team. We don't think adding more people would not necessarily add more Mythical Man Months. ;-) Not duplicating effort. Items are clearly assigned to one person.
 * Kept up momentum despite people being at conferences or on vacation.
 * What should we start doing? New ideas and things to improve.
 * Showing up to meetings on time
 * Take existing cards into account when adding new cards.
 * Strongly consider not adding new cards until the backlog is clear from things in Needs Review/QA. Alternative is to take things out of Current Sprint To Do.
 * What should we stop doing? What blocked progress?
 * Cards sitting around in Needs Review/QA list. What can we do about this?
 * There are things in our control fully. What blocks these is having the time in a sprint to get these reviewed/built, and we should finish them before we add more to the sprint.
 * There are things we wait for review outside the team, like core fixes. Solution is Scrum of Scrums and bugging individuals.


 * Spurious QUnit failures from other code - https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=63579


 * Rollback deployments due to bugs. :( We wouldn't have necessarily caught the bugs in code review, but it would have maybe been better to not have him deploying alone.

April 18, 2014

 * What should we keep doing? What went well?:
 * R&D talks design with designers
 * Design team plus R&D (Aaron, Pau, May, Leila, Oliver)
 * Splitting up research projects into background, analysis, and reporting tasks
 * Each card has a definition of done and a user story attached to it (when relevant)
 * Scheduling time to talk about investigating topics/how to solve a problem


 * What should we start doing? New ideas and things to improve.:
 * Provide instructions on how to test a patch when it moves to the Review stage.
 * This was particularly true when it comes to testing the data pipeline which is more complicated.
 * When we want to deliver something that will span two sprints, being up-front about that
 * Never ignore a -1 from Siebrand and other i18n staff/translatewiki admins. This was bad.
 * Stuff is ugly and inconsistent all over Wikipedia. Moiz needs to get on Gerrit, start pushing krazy klean kode, create havoc for all frontend engineers.
 * One item of review which Steven and Moiz talked about, then we commented on Gerrit/Trello which then Sam had to respond to.
 * Other cards that we wanted to do which are really small:
 * https://trello.com/c/esLEDzJu
 * https://trello.com/c/5u0KPOFb
 * Solution is for Pau/Moiz/Steven/Juliusz to work on git-review etc.
 * Be sure bring up things like Schema:PageRestoration


 * What should we stop doing? What blocked progress?:
 * Interviews: these take time. How can we balance them with the needs of the sprint?
 * Matt did five interviews for Director of Community Engagement and Growth position.
 * Sam did one for Growth
 * Steven, Aaron, Moiz, and Pau did four interviews for the UX researcher position + reviewing candidate tasks
 * Aaron reviewed/screened ~30 applications for new Researcher rec. (Fundraising).
 * Spending so much time bringing Beta Features releases to production
 * Steven spent a good 40+ hours during this sprint on Typography Refresh
 * Solution is to say no more!

April 4, 2014

 * Things to start doing:
 * We should more fully decompose cards at the time of sprint planning. In plain English: that means breaking stuff down in to smaller tasks. We could do a better job of this during the sprint planning. A concrete example of this is the non-linear tours card, which really should have been at least six cards instead of one or two. This also applies to research cards, which right now tend to represent a whole cycle of measurement, preliminary reporting, review, and final reporting.
 * Split the "Doing" list in to "In Development" and "Needs Review/QA". We agreed that cards tend to sit in the Doing column a while. This isn't because they're blocked, but because "doing" really means either "I am working on this" or "I am waiting on someone else to look at/code review/QA/verify requirements" on this. Splitting these two up should help us differentiate between these two steps better. I've completed this already in Trello.
 * Track spikes and apply a label to them. We aren't really tracking these as work items right now, even though we do it fairly often.


 * Things to stop doing:
 * Remove the "In Code Review" label and replace with the new Spike label. This works since we have a new Review column.
 * Stop adding cards mid-sprint unless you consult with the team. If you want to add a card to the Current To Do list, then email the team mailing list to confirm we think it's an immediate blocker/priority that we overlooked during sprint planning.

March 26, 2014

 * To-do items we agreed on then:
 * We have developed a tiny backlog in code review. Let's be diligent about bringing up blockers like this during standup.
 * We want to do retrospectives more frequently. Steven to set up a meeting for 30 minutes maximum, after every sprint.
 * We need to more clearly define sprint theme. That is answering the question: what value do we want deliver to users?
 * Steven will set up time to talk about product strategy for anonymous editor acquisition. Aaron and maybe others not yet feeling like they have sufficient visibility in to the reasoning behind the theory of impact and design decisions on this.
 * Steven work with the team and the product group on a quarterly Growth roadmap, with direction from Howie. Will send this out to the team mailing list.
 * We need to get back in the habit of doing a quarterly planning discussion before each quarterly review. The next one is Wednesday, May 21st, so we need to do another of these before that. Look for a calendar invite.


 * Other items discussed but still unclear:
 * Should we have a funky naming scheme for sprints? Mobile uses animal names. Flow uses . I proposed we use names of film stars (Alec Baldwin, Charlie Chaplin, Natalie Portman). Suggestions?