Community Tech/Retrospectives/2015-09-15

Action items from last time

• Standups (chickens and pigs)
  • Johan listens, and then might share info at the end (seems to be working)
• CL communication as part of workshops?
  • Maybe a topic for next week's workshop?
• Backlog ran empty
  • Not a problem now. Big backlog.
• Find way to have more communications outside of the standups (one-on-ones)
  • Scheduled weekly 1:1's
• Timeboxing spikes: Worked well, or didn't?
  • Hard to timebox due to external dependencies
• Process for dealing with unfinished work from previous sprint
  • Rolled over outstanding work into next sprint
• Communications w/Editing (and other) teams
  • No action other than creating a goal for next Q to write up and share with teams
  • Would like clear process and expectations

What has gone well?

• Meetings seem to fit in time slots OK with current practices
• Bryan Davis was very helpful on untangling some of the bot code
• Consulting with community on talk page about what to do on the bot was helpful
• Phabricator's still working pretty well
• Estimations/prioritizations went much more smoothly+1
  • Hatjitsu was useful
• Development work has gone well.
• Was able to work independently because of the nature of database-reports task
• There were fruitful communications with MZ and Lego on IRC
• Spliting the Phab boards seem to be OK so far (easier to see what's going on)
• Meeting with Niharika seems to have been really useful for both of us in the last two weeks+1
• Getting access to old tool code has been easier than I expected (although maybe there were exceptions?)

What could have gone better?

• Working with community legacy code: super frustrating and hard to keep momentum going
• Specific engineering maneger/support when Ryan was gone would have been useful
• Could use more review/feedback+

+* Didn't actually complete a lot of work (although some tasks were in review/clean-up) +* Work could have been faster if lesser time was spent on trying to fix legacy code and not just do it all over

• More interaction with the community would have been better for fixing the database reports
• Satisfaction survey is behind schedule due to a couple issues and lack of time
• The extension itself was all right but I could've used more support/structure during it
• We need a PM. I think I need more of Ryan's time but there isn't that much of it.
• Niharika and Frances both ran into poorly documented and therefore confusing code (though Martin's been good at answering questions for the bot)
  • Much time was wasted trying to fix legacy code without documentation.

What else is on your mind?

• Need to gear up for wishlist survey
• One week sprint extension, good? bad? discuss.
• How do we do code review in GitHub?

Deeper discussions

• Working with community legacy code: super frustrating and hard to keep momentum going
  • Dispiriting to spend a lot of time and not necessariy have a lot of results
  • Would be fun as an academic exercise, but not with task of making real changes
  • Lack of documentation. Original maintainers not helpful.
  • "Was faster to write it myself"
  • Lego has been helpful; maybe other people with broad knowledge could help
  • In some cases, consider rewriting from scratch--might be more efficient
  • End goal is to have working, maintainable code
  • Expectations: If not realistic, frustration is natural
  • After wishlist survey, might have more new code and less legacy
  • Ties into need for PM (or more availabilty of Ryan as mgmt) (Ryan is continuing to push on this issue)
• Need to gear up for wishlist survey
  • Roadmap has survey going by end of month, which is really soon
  • Mostly Ryan
  • Needs guidance regarding translations; needs CL support (more than Johan)
  • Will need to translate actual proposals (talking with Siko)
  • Want to recruit volunteers to help moderate the survey process
  • Polishing draft process (will float this week)
  • Niharika has some related experience so maybe could help; Frances willing to help think things through
• How do we do code review in GitHub?
  • Wants to leave feedback, but no clean UI to leave notes
  • Apparently github does have line-by-line commenting; Frances has the knowledge

Retro of retro

• Train delays shortened the meeting!
• Didn't get to talk about everything (maybe that's OK?)
• Would've liked more time for discussing issues raised
• 2 weeks?
  • Seems right (3 is too long)
  • Maybe make next one longer if not everything got talked about
• Have team enter items in etherpad ahead of time?
  • Rarely seems to work
• Reviewing action items at start?
  • Useful
  • Hopefully fewer of them in the future

Action Items (pulled out after the meeting ended)

• Working with community legacy code: super frustrating and hard to keep momentum going
• Specific engineering manager/support when Ryan was gone would have been useful
• Could use more review/feedback
• More interaction with the community would have been better for fixing the database reports