Readers/Web/Team/Retrospectives/2014-09-29

From mediawiki.org

Events of Last Iteration[edit]

Eat Pray Love (9/15/14-9/29/14)[edit]

Notable events:

  • Baha starts!
  • Quarterly review
  • New team members announced (Sam, Rob, Joaquin)
  • Jon back

Absences:

  • Jon sick 9/26
  • Kaldari dentist

Points carried over from previous iteration: 5 Points attempted: 27 Points completed: 17 Velocity chart: https://docs.google.com/a/wikimedia.org/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AqEdtQuSLdAxdGF0Unlob2MtRmZTeU4tODJXbk9rQ1E&usp=drive_web#gid=1

Actions from last retrospective:

  • Come up with a schedule/timeline for UI standardization work in order to improve focus and organization [Tomasz] meeting every Thursday! DONE
  • Schedule a mid-sprint design review meeting to cut down on back-and-forth overhead [Kristen] OUTSTANDING
  • Pair on a story this sprint to enhance javascript knowledge [Jon/Max] ONGOING
  • Propose some structural changes to the PM meeting (product showcase, updates on priorities) in order to understand other teams' priorities and improve cross-team coordination (before things are released) [Maryana, Dan backup] Maryana proposed this, was well-received; will do demos

What's been working well?[edit]

  • Devs helping me out on IRC was great. One on one sessions with Jon and Max too.
  • We (are close to having) almost have no (actionable) bugs. That's great! :)
  • Quarterly review had a large attendance because we are awesome.
  • Florian is doing stories for us now from the must have column.
    • was helpful to have backlog groomed for volunteers/onboarding

What hasn't worked well?[edit]

  • Felt Baha's onboarding could have been more structured. I hope he's not too lost :)
  • Seems to be some tension between wanting to get WikiGrok built fast/hacky for testing & wanting it to get built well/polished for reuse
  • getting balance between speed and quality right (same as above really - on a shared codebase we need to do a better job of following patterns to be more sustainable (maybe better to build prototypes on-wiki?)
    • alpha becomes more "standalone"? not integrated with other parts of the code
    • design can get involved doing more prototypes?
    • on wiki js?

Action! set up meeting to talk about this JON

  • bad estimations in terms of wikigrok stuff
    • NOTE: estimations were based on being hacky
  • I wasn't able to work on a feature/story. Only bug fixes.

Action! make sure we have some tiny stories in sprint during onboarding period KRISTEN

  • Lightning deploy wasn't communicated and caused confusion between Kaldari and I.

Action! email mobile-tech when a lightning deploy is happening

  • Still want to make sure design signs off before card is done
    • Design will add THEIR FACES to the cards they care about

What confuses?[edit]

  • How we onboard people
  • How we are going to cope with 3 new additional hires in a month :)
  • Large codebase without a well written documentation
    • Echo had a technical writer who outlined stuff and engineers filled in details
    • technical writer as an "ask"?
    • Action! found out if WMF going to replace Sumana (bug Robla) KALDARI
    • Action! Make some cards to document code Baha BAHA
    • VE team has a Jenkins job that complains if you don't add documentation
    • Action! do soem docuamntaiton on hygiene day TEAM
  • Where do we see quarterly goals?