Review status of previous action items[edit]

Feel like we don't have time to talk about TPG stuff
- Action: Kevin to enter into backlog (DONE)
- Further action postponed by wikimania, but ideas have been kicked around, and will be implemented "soon"
- No further group action required
Epics v Goals v Quarterly planning
- Action: Joel & Max enter item in Phab to collect user requirements
  - Carry over
  - https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T105243
who owns phabricator internally and how do we coordinate communication to upstream?
- Action: Arthur to point David to owner of who to work with upstream, David to enter Phab item to fix wikis
- David has added many tasks and is in progress.
Documentation seems more as a collab space of where to solidify ideas and process rather than documentation
- +1 to scattered and incomplete documentation
- Issues of pub & private documentation still unresolved
- Action: TPG to model good behavior
- no further retro action planned

What has happened since last Retro (2015-07-01)[edit]

Wikimania!
- Hackathon different than what Kevin anticipated
- not small teams focused on specific projects
- indivs working on their own
- unfocussed
- cool stuff showed off in showcase
- less of a party and more of a conference
- good talks
- social events were poorly coordinated
- going to Wikimania could generate work for TPG
- our proposed talks were rejected
THCs started crankin'
- observed different levels of engagement at different teams
- Google Docs are getting less interaction than etherpads (2 of 3 THCs observed)
- so many chat channels, lots of uncoordinated chatting
- wide disparity of sharing / Diversity of sharing levels between participants
- Should we do a retro of the THC? (I think we will)
  - we will :)
  - No signs that we need a mid-THC course correction
Quarterly Review
- Infrastructure was enlightening
- Managers appreciate the new streamlined format
- the Advancement review had interesting notes about goals. (80% of goals is a good target to hit--goals that push you are good). The expectation is not clear or well distributed.
(Potentially) Interesting Team Work
- Backlog Analysis: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1vGDe0FYb2e0B1FZIoAWaOSElxmd1dwt1py9_qpPCjC4/edit#slide=id.p
- Phragile development
  - David starting to coalesce Phabricator needs/pain points
I AM AN AGILE COACH (ALL CAPS!!)
We started doing Tea Time
- Struggling to find the groove
- conflict with Wikimania and other schedule issues
Performance reviews, comp adjustments
- Promotion email fatigue
- "Cool and valuable experience"
- Managers seemed to handle it well
Sync up with Andre
- TODO: schedule a second Andre chat

Not so goods[edit]

no room scheduled for this meeting today
Phab+
- Phabricator is really not user friendly
- Phabricator lacks documentation... period
- Phragile continues to be a frustrating project (responsible but no authority)+
- still waiting to find out if we have any money/leverage to get changes+
Grace working with Joel less
Not everyone has offline IRC buffering++
- TODO: Joel to invite Kristen to IRCCloud (and we should confirm that IRC scrollback/attention is an SOP/expectation for TPG)
Tea Time++
- tea time- would prefer agenda ahead of time and could it be optional attendance?
- tea time on Fri- only day I usually take off
- people late for Andre tea time meeting
- Discussion: should tea time have an agenda, or is this antithetical to the spirit of tea time?
- having an agenda might make it more appealing that discussing ad-hoc topics
- having an agenda could make clearer what it is
Still stuck a little bit in deep conceptual issues about work planning and tracking+
- David is unsure where to find conversation. Lots of information in multiple channels +++
- overlapping discussions and overlapping Venn circles of who and different technologies (email, IRC, flow, talk page)
- Not clear where the tip of the conversation is
- Kristen: don't have a problem with this, not sure why
- Kevin: org-wide problem; can't imagine a total solution
- root causes?
  - tools are problematic
  - team hasn't fully gelled in habits/shared assumptions
  - maybe we don't fully understand what our team is actually doing (as a team). what is our mandate, what is our balance of priorities?
    - ambiguity in our Vision -> Mission -> strategy -> tactics?
      - not at Vision level, but below that
    - balance of individual team members working with teams / areas of interest vs TPG function as a whole team
      - TPG people helping other TPGers as "peer review" on each other's specific areas
    - TPG people doing TPG-level work
      - coming up with best practices for WMF and disseminating them
      - TPG-focused work (THCs, what else?)
    - open questions at the vision/mission/strategy level
      - when (if ever) should TPG speak as a single voice?
        best practices for speaking authoritatively
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tA3dzBrXYtc
- one consequence: feeling unproductive, divorced from "real work"
Scope creep on RelEng task writeup++
THC scheduling - much rescheduling, next week is THC ClusterF$*k
Wikimania/vacation drag+
VE wants out of Scrum of Scrums, doesn't find it usefulhaha, Reading team just asked for more VE presence at SoS Haha! Ed showed up today just to listen in++
- TODO: Joel and Grace to follow up. Kristen can provide examples of inter-team communications that reading things would have gone better.
Ops dependencies are still slowing Discovery (although it seems better than in the past)
Arthur jetlagged and distracted

Goods[edit]

We have significantly improved the phabricator search and dashboard documentation
Intra-TPG collab:+
- Kevin in Mex with Grace, muchas gracias!
- Grace working with Kristen more
- Grace chatting with David more- proximity FTW!
Making headway on Reading strategy process+
Turned the corner on Burnup charting tools and am now fairly productive at doing new kinds of analysis
Moved from Master -> Coach
THC guidelines seem to be working+
2 x TPGERS in vertical (KL/Max)++
- "having two TPG people assigned to teams in the same vertical (Reading) has provided some benefits"
Editing team was able to push back on Lila's Wikimania demo request+

"Interesting"[edit]

Some teams are moving Scrum->Kanban, but Discovery is moving Kanban->Scrum <- Kanbum?+

retro retro notes[edit]

we could try digging into good/not-so-good while doing the "what happened since" list
Variability from retro to retro is arguably a good thing--keeps things fresh
is there a way to spend less time on (uncontroversial) information sharing and more on identifying gaps and conflicts?