Reading/Multimedia/Meetings/Next Cycle 2 Q4 2013-14

MULTIMEDIA NEXT CYCLE PLANNING: Q4 - Cycle 2
Meeting Notes - April 30, 2014

The Wikimedia Foundation's multimedia team held planning meetings for our next development cycle on April 28 and 29, 2014 in San Francisco. Here are our notes, prepared collaboratively on this shared notepad.

Participants

Gilles Dubuc - engineering team lead
Fabrice Florin - product manager, host
Pau Giner - designer
Mark Holmquist - engineer
Rob Lanphier - engineering director
Keegan Peterzell - community liaison
Gergo Terza - engineer

Agenda

Goals for Next 6-week Cycle
Current Cycle Performance Review
Capacity of the team in this Next Cycle
Estimate Stories for this Next Cycle
Estimate Backlog left for Current Cycle
Determine which Tasks to move into the Next Cycle
Retrospective for Current Cycle ending now

Discussion

Goals for Next Cycle

Review this Next Cycle's goals (10 mins).

As a team, we agreed to focus on wrapping up development and releasing Media Viewer v0.2 in the current 6-week cycle, ending this week.

Our next 6-week cycle starts on May 1, and ends on June 11 (second half of fiscal Q4). In this next cycle, we plan to switch our focus to Upload Wizard and Technical Debt, while addressing Media Viewer's most critical issues, as needed.

For this next 6-week cycle, we propose to divide our time evenly between these three main projects:

Media Viewer - release worldwide, address final critical tasks (e.g. serious bugs, global load estimates, basic zoom feature)
Technical Debt - fix serious issues that need quick solutions (e.g. image scalers, timed media handler update)
Upload Wizard - start planning for this project (metrics, feedback, UX designs, code review, unit tests)

See updated Mingle wall for what is now our current cycle.

In subsequent cycles, we expect work on Upload Wizard and Technical Debt to continue to be a primary focus for us. We also hope to start work on Structured Data and File Notifications this summer, as time allows.

Current Cycle Results

Review Current Cycle achievements and overall performance (15 mins).

See Completed Tasks for this Cycle.

Key accomplishments:
- faster image load
- complete share, download, embed
- more license info
- user opt-out, site disable
- refactor code base
- first metrics + surveys
- more unit tests
- usability tests
- UI designs for final features
- more community discussions
- release to first pilots
- updated product plan

We completed about 128 development points in the last 6 weeks (vs. 164 points in previous 8-week cycle)
Current Cycle Breakdown:
- Stories: 72 pts. (56%)
- Bugs: 30 pts. (23%)
- Tech Debt: 7 pts. (5%)
- Scope Increase: 15 pts. (12%)
- Team Meetings: 3pts. (2%)
Previous cycle breakdown: Stories 49 points, Bugs 28 pts, Tech debt 31 pts, Scope increase 20 pts, Meetings 35 pts

This means about 108 pts. for planned development overall (excluding meetings and scope increases = ~18 points)
That's about 21 points per week, or 18 points of planned development per weekly sprint (vs. 13.5 points last cycle, nice improvement!)
Note we still have 68! points of tickets that we were hoping to do in the current cycle (an entire cycle's worth of work)
Most of these tickets will have to be postponed to a later date, if we want to make progress on Upload Wizard and Tech Debt

Team Capacity

Estimate Capacity of the team in this Next Cycle (5 mins).

Estimated capacity : ~11 points/ week = ~66 points for the Next Cycle (a bit less than usual 12 pts, because Mark is away in Zurich)
We noted a discrepancy between what we think our team capacity is (e.g. ~11 pts) and what we actually deliver (e.g.: ~21 pts). We want to investigate what's causing this discrepancy, so we can get better at estimating.

Next Cycle Estimates

Estimate Stories proposed for this Next Cycle and come up with the final list based on the estimations and capacity of the team (30min).

Estimate Backlog left for Current Cycle
Identify top candidates for Next Cycle
Estimate new tasks under consideration for Next Cycle

We estimated cards in a second meeting, to include new critical cards for Upload Wizard and Image Scaler issues (e.g.: http://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/image-scaler-plans )

The Next Cycle wall now includes separate columns for Media Viewer (~28 points), Tech Debt (~29 points) and Upload Wizard (~21 points). See updated Mingle wall for what is now our current cycle.

We moved all leftover Media Viewer cards from the Current Cycle into either this Next Cycle Wall -- or in one of the Media Viewer Release walls in Team Favorites (see upper right corner of Mingle site). We staged them into 4 separate releases (1: pilot release under way, 2: full release of version 2 on all wikis, 3: next release of version 3 later this fiscal year, 4: future releases in future years

Next Cycle Tasks

Determine which Tasks to take on for the Next Cycle, and which to push back to Subsequent or other Cycles (15 mins).

Reach team consensus on top priorities
Move relevant tasks over to the Next Cycle for development
Push back other tasks over to Subsequent Cycle or later
Adjust above goals as needed
See updated Mingle wall

Retrospective

Review what we did well, not so well, what could be improve, and show appreciation for each other's work (15-30min).

Keep doing

Continue to be as productive as we were in the last cycle (when we completed a lot of tasks -- with less scope increase as before)
Keep collecting metrics even more (it is so useful for us and the community, should do this for Upload Wizard)
Go out of our way to write unit tests, our broad coverage was really helpful (almost none of the bugs came back, thanks to unit tests)
Community outreach worked well for us, in multiple channels (asked people properly for help, building relationships, getting input from different channels, surveys, etc.)
Got better at dealing with secondary tasks that were out of focus before (e.g. GW Toolset)
Starting to get transparency right, reports are helpful, communication on mailing list is very useful to get feedback from our users

Stop doing/do better

We try to take on more than we can handle (too many cards left on the current cycle wall, should be more selective, or stagger tasks in a more realistic way)
We're not doing much volunteer developer outreach, may be missing some opportunities there (e.g. someone to work on Media Viewer when we're gone)
Handling of bugs in Bugzilla is very messy, should spend more time on Bugzilla

Suggested improvements

Do metrics even sooner, to inform our decisions (e.g. for Upload Wizard)
Do better end-to-end tests (get Gergo and Mark to write some as well, not just Gilles)
Create cycle walls that show projects in different columns (E.g.: MV, UW, Tech debt)
Host more developer events during Hackathons (e.g. Wikimania, Zurich)
Need more developer documentation, list of items that a developer can work on
Move more Bugzilla bugs over to Mingle, get ready to address these issues with Phabricator
Move more code to Core rather than MediaViewer

Show appreciation

Pau > Team: Thanks to team for accomplishing so much, and trying to find things that went wrong, to improve process
Gilles > Fabrice + Keegan: Thanks for taking such good care of the community outreach, went really well, no drama
Fabrice > Keegan: Special thanks to Keegan for all your great work, it's great to have you as a partner
Keegan> Fabrice: Yes, you're welcome, we're starting to get the hang of it :)
Fabrice > Gergo: Thanks for being the consistent voice of reason, pushing us to be more transparent and improve our development process
Gergo > Team: It's nice to work in a team where you can work on these issues, to improve them together
Gergo > Team/Pau: Thanks to team for making design a priority and to Pau for responding so quickly to change requests
Gilles > Pau: Thanks for your curiosity to learn about Gerrit, developer tools that are not used much by designers
Gergo > Gilles + Mark: Thanks for all the work on metrics, was really helpful
Gilles > M: Thanks for moving all that metrics code to Gerrit
Fabrice > Team: Thanks to you all for all the great work that wasn't mentioned above