Community Tech/Retrospectives/2015-08-24

What has gone well?

• It's nice to have Phab tickets to work off of, easy to pick one and go
  • Phab is not as light as trello, but seems better integrated
  • "Will learn to like phabricator"
• Standups are good to keep on track
  • Like the frequency
• Had time to look into interesting stuff and contribute to CoC discussions
• Glad we have a manager and Team Practices support!
• Security training was a lot of fun and useful
• I have learnt a lot of new stuff - bots/gadgets as part of the research/spike cards
• Communication with different teams as part of the spike card research process has gone well - I now know more people from more departments
• Collaborating with TCB team (although not a whole lot yet)
  • Hoping to review TCB code and vice versa
  • "2 week cadence seems about right"
• So far it seems like we all can agree on things and work with each other, which is good.
• Interaction with the community has been positive so far
• Getting feedback from community members and stakeholders in Phabricator has worked surprisingly well

What could have gone better?

• We need to work out a process for Community Liaison support, so the Community Liaison knows how to best support the team.
• Not enough work for this sprint +1
• I didn't keep the spike card timeframe (half a day/a day) really in mind which led me to do fewer spike cards than I could have done. I got lost in trying out the actual extensions instead of just finding out stuff about them and leaving that there.
• Feel a need for a meeting to discuss things more than the standups - find myself asking on IRC more
  • more 1:1s?
• We could have had better acceptance criteria for the spike cards (i.e. more clear instructions about the expected outcomes of the investigations)
• Would like to connect better with other dev
  • Weekly 1:1 are good, but maybe more?
• Still stalled on SecurePoll stuff, partly because of feedback and partly because of inertia
• Getting useful feedback from the Editing team has been a bit painful
• Would be nice to have coding work
• Would like to start 1:1s
• "Feel a little lost in phabricator"
• "Could not use phab productively without configuring my notifications"
• I (Ryan) feel like I haven't been doing a lot of engineering managing (been doing more product mgmt)
  • Find the balance

What else is on your mind?

• At standups, does it make sense to ask Johan, or should he just observe?

Action Items

• Standups (chickens and pigs)
• CL communication as part of workshops?
• Backlog ran empty
• Find way to have more communications outside of the standups (one-on-ones)
• TImeboxing spikes: Worked well, or didn't?
• Process for dealing with unfinished work from previous sprint
• Communications w/Editing (and other) team

Retro the Retro

• Hopefully next time less remote, but went well considering
• Etherpad process went well
• Possibly vote and deeper discussions at some point