Readers/Web/Team/Retrospectives/2014-11-10

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Special Edition: MEGATEAM[edit]

Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand. tldr: AGF

At the end of a project everyone knows so much more. Naturally we will discover decisions and actions we wish we could do over. This is wisdom to be celebrated, not judgement used to embarrass.


Observations:

  • There have been times during the last couple of sprints where people feel unclear about what to do next.
  • It is unclear how emergent work should be handled in the context of our current process.
  • We have not finished estimating stories during our estimation meeting for the past two sprints.
  • Story prioritization has bled over in to story estimation.
  • It has been challenging to keep up a well-groomed prioritized backlog.
  • We are constantly learning new things about WikiGrok/WikiData as we proceed with the work.
  • It has been hard to keep everyone up to speed with what is going on.
  • Group conversations have been more challenging.
  • Code review needs have increased.
  • We are getting a lot of (high value?) work done.
  • We are developing better awareness of and ways of handling technical debt.
  • Coordinating with design and analytics has been more challenging.

One word retrospective:

Analysis/Discussion:

  • Never finish meetings anymore
  • disconnect between the fast pace at which we're working and the slowness of releasing (eg Moiz designed wikigrok a 2.5 months ago, why isn't it in prod?)
  • Kaldari and Maryana seem overwhelmed; have lots of meetings and responsibility for making more work
  • went from velocity 12 -> over 50; thought this would take longer!!!
  • surprised at how much time is needed to coordinate with Analytics (better than not having enough analytics)
  • tech lead and product are not enough to flesh out work/refine accpetance criteria; may need to revive business analyst role
  • Side effect of lack of work is that people care more about/have mroe time to care about the code: documentation, cleanliness, conventions, testing

Outcomes:

  • business analyst role in addition to tech lead? (Fundraising had this)
  • Max: cards in sprint need more diversity; not just wikigrok and bugs but different areas; also prevent burnout
  • Jon: more diversity of roles/responsibilities
  • Tomasz: splitting the team along functional areas
  • Kaldari: soft split; form teams based on what we're working on at the time (this is happening organically already); split up backlogs along sensible lines
  • Technical BS meeting

Soft split risks/challenges:

  • if no one owns the process nothing will come out of it
  • might not be interesting for other group to hear group Bs standup
  • infrastructure/wikigrok split: infrastructure can be boring, maybe morale will be impacted, whereas wikigrok is exciting
  • If we split meetings up, teams will be disconnected, won't be up to speed (will require trust); fear of the silo effect that is pesent in the foundation
  • We'd need a syncer, regular high-level communication
  • avenues for communication: code review, high-level email reporting (sprint commitments) for communicatign upwards and sideways; more regular showcases

Actions:

  • 2 backlogs, 1 board; splitting backlog grooming and signoff
  • keep standups unified, planning meetings separate
  • Maryana owns wikigrok backlog; Jon owns tech backlog
  • might be a weird iteration
  • come up with goals for experiment and bounds
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