Reading/Multimedia/Retrospectives/2017-10-12

2017-10-12

Previous Action Items

• Ramsey to take stab at sorting out the backlog cruft, classifying untriaged work. Also, will keep a list of things that need dev attn.
  • DONE
• Amanda to send out visualized Phab task tree.
  • DONE
• Max to swap Grooming and Planning
  • DONE
• Cormac to handle circulating retro notes for review and posting them on MW
  • DONE
• Mark will put the retro publishing instructions at the top of this etherpad because documentation
  • DONE

What in the team's process is going well?

• Team seems to be jumping into MediaInfo tasks successfully (though there is certainly more work to do)
• Phab tickets are being addressed in a fairly timely manner.
• Backlog grooming went smoother with our new categorization system, we got important things looked at and now have a record of what we need to inspect next time

What in the team's process could be improved?

• US/Germany time differences make collaboration with WMDE a little complex (maybe we are using suboptimal channels?)
  • IRC would be more "push" than "pull" for getting attention, even if a little disruptive
  • Ramsey is available to help with communication challenges, so don't be afraid to tell him
  • Euro MM folks are a good group for this too
• Is anyone monitoring MM phab for new (potentially urgent/important) tickets? (I've mostly ignored general MM board since we have Workboard)
  • Ramsey: yes
  • This no longer belongs in "could be improved"
• I wonder if we should be looking at the work in progress as part of standup (e.g. the Working Board)
  • Ramsey:
    • In our free form conversations right now we are pretty verbose. If confused, you can say as much.
    • Could be useful, for ex, in the Gergo item on thumbnailing, things that have lots of discussion, etc
    • In standup, we might just raise blockers
    • ATM, the backlog needs more attention than the Working Board

What in the team's process is confusing?

• Today highlighted some questions about what our standups are meant to be - do we use them for MM team work only, or SDC work, or both? Also, how in-depth do we get?
• what's the process for old tickets with existing patches that we might want to pick up?
• What to do with tasks that need QA? (which do we resolve ourselves, how fast do they get resolved, ...)
  • We have a lot of open tickets in Phab, mostly in QA. Do we have guidelines for who attends to those?
  • We are accomplishing the goal of pushing out code, but the QA column is filling up. Is that a useful metric.

Action Items

• Cormac to document Mark's Code Review Rules for -1/-2/Abandon, with the Matthias Addendum
• Ramsey to chat with Anthony about QA capacity for MM
• Goal is to establish MM norms around mounting QA tasks
• Matthias to publish retro notes