Team Practices Group/Retrospectives/2015-06-05

The Team Practices Group (TPG) was dissolved in 2017.

TPG Retrospective - 5 June 2015

Action items from last retrospective (27 April 2015) edit

  • ACTION: Grace to come up with proposal for codes, circulate with the team via Phab ticket [email subject line codes] DONE!
  • ACTION: Experiment with this convention til next retrospective, though we reserve the right to bring it up sooner if things really aren’t working well [email subject line codes] DONE! keep the codes! (added [LOLZ])
  • ACTION: Arthur to create a phab ticket documenting this issue and own finding this an owner [for RelEng collaboration on improving testing/reducing tech debt] DONE!

Big events since our last retrospective (27 April 2015) edit

  • Published THC results
  • TPG +2 !!!
  • Hackathon
  • Kanban discussions
  • Grace acquired another team -Design Research
  • Reorg fallout
  • Arthur/KL -> Spotify trip
  • Arthur/KL Scrum Gathering as speakers!
  • MPL (Master Project List)
  • SF meetups (after work)
  • Phab charts, including Joel's work
  • Deep VE process report (super health check)
  • Changes to TPG regular meetings
  • Kristen led week-long RelEng workshop


What's worked well?
edit

  • MB Excellent firehose support
  • MB Immediately apparent that "there are no silly questions" is in effect
  • TPG covered well while Arthur and Kristen were out
  • Joel felt well-supported with help as needed for his team duties
  • Kevin/Grace collaboration on getting THC 
  • TPG getting into Kanban!
  • Buddy format for onboarding +1
  • Kevin’s help with posting THC results on wiki
  • Kevin’s willingness to give Grace the 30 mins he had to review THC results and later follow up as fresh eyes on some of the language
  • the email subject line tags!
  • Joel’s VE interview doc and opportunity to comment on
  • Joel’s knowledge of PMI cert renewal process helpful to Grace
  • no major meltdowns during Arthur’s absence
  • the SOP process discussions in various team meetings
  • Philosophical conversations about Kanban
  • Joel's emphasis on metrics, process docs, "why are we doing X?"
  • Onboarding 2 people at once seemed to work well ("Nice to have a friend")
  • RelEng workshop really worked well (having 2 people working together was great)
  • Having 2 people working together at scrum gathering was also great
  • not losing our shit about the reorg navigated reorg well, maintained our composure
  • Speedy meetings


What hasn't?
edit

  • Now that we are bigger, our meetings are more focused on the work, and less on the social, philosophical++++++
  • Not much visibility between verticals, despite being present. Could do cross-polination (informal chats about what's going on...qualitative, contextual) ++++
    • Maybe a SoS of scrummers...bringing collaboration cross-vertical impediments to each other
    • A chance to raise challenges and get group input
    • e.g. "Why are there no mobile devs in the Editing team?"
    • maybe regular unstructured meetings

Action! Weekly 1 hour long meeting, agenda to be coordinated [Arthur]

  • Phabricator is not yet doing our bidding++++
    • Trying to get it to burnups has been frustrating

Fuzzy and Huge Action! Clarify requirements around Phabricator - add this to the backlog [Joel]

  • We probably need some norms for how to use our mailing lists (esp. public vs. private) +++

Action! Start a thread about this [Kevin]

  • Many ramp-up emails/channels for information +1
    • Disconnect between team onboarding expectations and actual documentation (or actions taken by other teams, such as IT)
    • Sometimes unclear whom to ask about what, beyond onboarding buddy
  • Joel would like to be able to go to meetups, but hard to do after work
  • Team Calendar frustrations (per Kevin's email thread)
  • Booking conf rooms has problems: Often they are all full. 5th floor bookings don't get saved properly. Painful to move between floors
    • Although it is better than before the 5th floor opened
  • Unclear expectation on reading all team THCs in prepartion of report
  • MPL- I think that it’s good, but a bit of drama getting there
  • reviewing Joel’s doc was on a tight deadline
  • Joel is having to chase down some process stuff that is happening within his team and leadership, instead of them proactively inviting him in +
  • Navigating public vs private notes, and how do you keep things consolidated when you have some things (eg notes) that should be private and others public?

Other questions/issues edit

  • We should compare which mailing lists we are subscribed to
  • We should compare how we each filter email (to learn from each other)
  • Action! Joel is goign to put together a survey to captue what each of our teams is doing [JOEL]