Wikimedia Discovery/Retrospective 2015-07-13

Review of previous retrospective action items

(NOTE: These were not reviewed during the 2015-07-13 retrospective itself, but I am documenting them here because in a perfect world, they would have been.)

Kevin

• Schedule our next retrospective  Done
• Clear blockers more quickly/frequently -- e.g. designate a scrummaster, or hold more frequent standups.  Done (hopefully).
  • Kevin is the designated blocker-clearer
• Process for pulling tasks into sprints has not been communicated clearly
  • Minor progress, but far from resolved
• Kanban (not Scrum) process has not been communicated clearly
  • Minor progress, but far from resolved
• Everyone should make sure their contact info is up-to-date  Done (hopefully)
  • https://office.wikimedia.org/wiki/Contact_list
• Didn't get David scheduled into the retrospective
  • It is not clear where this failure occurred. Will watch closely moving forward.
• Stacking meetings on one day works well for some people, but not for others
  • No change, but meeting schedules are likely to be overhauled soon anyway.
• Lack of IRC norms regarding buffers/bouncers, and whether people read scrollbacks
  • No progress.

Dan

• Confusion due to having engineering work in data workboard  Done
  • (workboards are now people-centric, so engineering work stays in engineering workboards)
• We are working on a lot of things slowly, rather than a few things quickly
  • Ongoing discussions, but no resolution.
• Data Analysis is bushed; ongoing tasks suck up too much bandwidth to allow for long-term planning Hopefully better now
• Protecting Oliver and really everyones time from randomization tasks
  • Hopefully better now

Wes/Tomasz

• Guiseppe has represented us in ops, but we might need more Much improved.
  • Ops has committed fractions of 4 additional people to help us meet quarterly goals.
  • Ongoing discussions about getting more dedicated support
• Some information droppage (notably when Wes/Tomasz are out simultaneously, or Dan by himself)
  • More of something to keep an eye on moving forward
• Few of us sitting close to each other  Done
  • (SF folks now have desks near each other)
• Budget has been a moving target
  • More of something to keep an eye on moving forward

Nik

• Two search outages recently
  • Reports were written up
• Nik is a single point of failure
  • Improved and ongoing. Nik has actively been transitioning knowledge to others

What's worked well:

• Quarterly review in general (this used to be, I kid you not, 20+ hours work for the product owner to put together a 60+ slide deck of every single thing done in the quarter, for a 3 hour presentation with half the organisation in the room. This time the expectations were clearer and it was much, much easier.)
• Onboarding template was 80% of totally awesome (compared to 0% at most new jobs) (+1)
  • Folks have been updating the onboarding docs
• Nik has been handling his departure well
  • Org's offboarding materials seem pretty good
• Wikimania presentation runthrough generated a lot of really helpful feedback
• Lots of improvement in process since the team was formed
• Dan getting a headstart on Q2 planning. (he somehow feels more organized than he has ever felt!)
• Terry, Lila, others feel like we're doing good work
• Dashboard is generating really interesting conversations with nontechnical staff, e.g. Communications, Community Engagement
  • Frequently asked question is "Why is this data inconsistent across platforms?" and my response is "Because the platforms are inconsistent with each other" :-)
• Data analysis pipeline, i.e. actually having a data analysis pipeline, continues to work really well
• Strong focus on quarterly goals is a really good thing. Still room to improve in the future.

What could be improved:

• Prior presentation of quarterly review (show it to the team before presenting it to mgmt)
• maps and wdqs: not moving fast enough to warrant weekly backlog grooming
• Phabricator tickets arn't often very specific, leaving many questions when it comes time to implement. The tickets in the sprint board backlog should be immediatly actionable.
• We don't seem to have a smooth way to convert Dan's "I want X" (a.k.a. user stories) into well-defined tasks + + +1000 <------ Ths one
• Establish {sprint/iteration/weekly/whatever} goals in the form of user stories
  • Review success/failure to achieve them
• Perhaps our process should shift to be more Scrum-like + +
• Possibly tasks are larger than they could be
• Still too few people in the office on team meeting days
  • When possible, try to get some face-time with the team
  • Moving whole-team meeting to Tuesday would help (or move others to Monday)
• Ongoing work toward more clearly and concisely explain what we are doing
• Could improve the terms we use internally (some goals seem ambiguous)
• Maintenance/technical operational work (restarts, adding extra data centres) continues to crop up and detracts from achieving goals. Need clarity around this,.+
  • Unclear line between us and ops responsibilities
  • Should we designate a Discovery eng as our ops-focused person? (since we didn't get an embedded ops person due to budget reductions)+
  • Would be nice to spell out what we expect from them, and what they expect from us
  • Should it be more defined to be able to automate deployment?
    • Automation can be difficult when the underlying process keeps changing
  • Packaging and puppetization are forms of automation
  • I feel like we spend more staff time/money talking about dealing with Ops than we would if we just hired an Ops person. A wise man once said this to me. +1 <------ Ths one +1 +1
• This retrospective (not as broad participation as we would hope)
• We have too many short meetings...fewer longer meetings might be more productive

What confuses us:

• How can we interact more with the community?

Retro of retro

• Last 15 minutes was best
• Circulate etherpad ahead of time
• Nice balance of what went well and what could be improved
• Monthly feels like a good cadence

Action items

Voted up

• We don't seem to have a smooth way to convert Dan's "I want X" (a.k.a. user stories) into well-defined tasks <--Kevin will faciliate
• Maintenance/technical operational work (restarts, adding extra data centres) continues to crop up and detracts from achieving goals. Need clarity around this
  • Wes will try to get us a dedicated Ops person. This is a long term plan.
  • Kevin will document Who from ops is helping with each of our projects
• Experiment with Scrum <-- Kevin will get with James, Dan and other volunteers
  • This is likely to include changes to meeting schedules

Others

• Circulate retrospective etherpad ahead of time (Kevin)