Readers/Web/Team/Retrospectives/2014-07-14

Events of Last 2 Iterations

Yolo Swag Bird (6/16/2014-6/30/2014)

Notable events:

   * Jon joins Flow team

Absences:

   * 6/16 - 6/17 Arthur vacation
   * 6/23 - Arthur sick
   * 6/23 - 6/27 Kaity vacation
   * 6/25 - 6/27 Arthur @ OS Bridge
   * 6/30 Max sick

Points carried over from previous iteration: 5 Points attempted: 22 Points completed: 12

Zedonk (6/30/2014-7/14/2014)

Notable events:

   * Quarterly/annual planning (7/1 - 7/2)
   * July 4 holiday

Absences:

   * 7/3 Juliusz
   * 7/3 - 7/9 Maryana
   

Points carried over from previous iteration: 10 Points attempted: 23 Points completed: TBD, ~5 - 13

What's been working well?

• Getting rid of crufty stuff in the code, getting ready to get rid of other crufty stuff in alpha/beta
• Lots of volunteer patches from Florian, much of it has been merged - integrating volunteer development!
• Annual/quarterly planning went really well; quickly and smoothly coalesced around common goal
• our frontend coding task will be used across teams
• Shayar said that Trevor's idea is good! (redo skin framework RFC)
• We're hiring Kristen
• Arthur running interference on QA/browser test woes :)

What hasn't worked well?

• No clear direction on infrastructure side of MobileFrontend ++++
  • ultimate goal - get more of MF into core, MF working as a normal skin, working out of the box in MW w/o having to set up extension
    • UI standardization stuff may impact the direction of this, although we've already moved a bunch of stuff to mediawiki.ui - would be a shame to throw it away
  • blocked on resolving the templating conversation
    • could help work on mantle? but may not be worthwhile...
    • logical next step: need to have a conversation with trevor, gabriel, and ideally someone from the mobile web team to keep moving this conversation forward
  • blocked on resolving the skin framework conversation (Trevor's RFC)
  • IndexPager needs to be rewritten (esp for Minerva on desktop), perhaps before adding any new one-off SpecialPages
  • We're in a holding pattern until skin and template RFCs are resolved; Max focussing on HHVM stuff for the next while so we'll need to hold off on IndexPager changes

Action! Kaldari to organize a meeting with relevant players to come up with concrete next steps on moving forward the template RFC conversation

• Lots of volunteer patches that require fixes or follow ups++++
  • volunteer work not necessarily lining up with team's priorities?
  • how much time should we spend on dealing with volunteer contributions?
  • how do we prioritize managing volunteer contributions relative to our other team priorities?
  • Jon was really active with code review/working with volunteers, Juliusz has been doing some of this lately
  • We all agree that supporting volunteer contributions is important and valuable
  • Limit how much time we spend reviewing patches?
  • Clearer bug triaging workflow?
  • How do other feature-oriented teams deal with this? no one knows!

Action! After bugs are triaged, Maryana/Juliusz update the priority of the bug in bugzilla

Action! Juliusz to get Jon's pre-commit review-nag hook working again

• browser test stuff feels like it's gotten worse++
  • Dan Duvall will be pairing with Juliusz to work on MF tests on Vagrant

• Some patches hard to review (PageImages, I don't know the code base, there are no tests)
  • MediaWiki sucks wrt images in tests
• need moar devssssss +
• quite a few things to work on outside of mobile (standardazing tech task, standardizing UI)
• Max low on Mobile-specific backendy things to do+
• Who should be doing code review for non-MF extensions that we rely on, particularly the ones maintained by Max when Max made code contributions that need review?
  • in particular: PageImages, TextExtracts, FeaturedFeeds
• sometimes items in 'awaiting final code review' do not have a link to the related patchset in gerrit

Parking Lot

• Max wants to be involved in at least one front-end interview cycle (Kaldari said he'd make sure to pull Max in to the next one)