Wikimedia Apps/imported/Retrospective-March 5 2015

Previous Retrospective Actions

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  • Action! Set up a meeting to discuss options for team split [DAN] DONE
  • Action! distill post-all hands awesomeness things that were helpful and add to app onboarding doc (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Apps/Team/Onboarding) [BRIAN] FAIL!!
  • Action! Schedule meeting to discuss new potential team norms and practices around our process, quality efforts, documentation, and other improvements (and how to measure success of these) [Tuesday March 3 proposed]) [KRISTEN] DONE but deferred; some (tech-centric) discussions have been happening regularly, although they're more code-centric
  • Action! (related to above) Brian share ideas about measuring our success and how can we make reflecting on our process more quantitative [BRIAN] DONE

Worked Well

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  • Feature catchup iOS +1
  • Speedup refactors iOS
  • Gerrit was OK - but not great
  • Stronger shared understanding of user value
  • Better team collaboration iOS
  • I see phab is in worked poorly, but my workflow, at least, has been fairly painless. Less jumping between it and trello at least has been nice
  • iOS dev talks - documentation and code review +1
  • Spike for the Node service +1
  • Android beta releases continue to be painless and steady
  • It was painful, but crash reporting... we're so close! +1
    • legal review is close!
  • Buggin' out (bug triage) +1
  • beta testing win: https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mobile-l/2015-March/008705.html
  • Code Review
  • Build server is racked!

Worked Poorly

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  • Sprint retrospective lag - I forget what happened - maybe do this meeting on Mondays? (ok sounds like since the last retro not neccesarily the last sprint?)
    • should retros be sprint based?
  • Spikes in the same sprint as related user stories is suboptimal and leads to stress
    • related to diminishing returns on readership? no :) (Dan)
  • <troll>Didn't ship an iOS AppStore release</troll> hahah-not trolling a real concern!
    • release DAILY!!!!!!!!!!!!!
    • don't release based on arbitrary intervals! keep master green! CONTINUOUS DELIVERRYYYYYY
  • Phabricator, and its many shades of grey
    • open Phab ticket when you encounter problems
  • Android hiring still slow
  • Gerrit: hard to do lots of things..
    • Follow convo threads
    • Collaborate
    • Follow iterative progress/amendments
  • Feedback on new changes: design & quality feedback loops are loooong (http://i2.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/356/149/c07.gif
  • Code review is a bit slow (see "gerrit is hard" comment)

Confuses Us

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  • Uncertain future for team structure + (db)
  • How do we want to deal with i18n on iOS?
    • there are open questions, Android side seems clearer?
  • Exact approach for Hackathon

Testing (+1 BG)


  • Why can't we allow pull request on Github? ++++
    • Action! Yuvi set up a magical bridge - talk to him! oh crap bernd already talked to him.
    • Gabriel and RESTBase team may have a clever mirroring solution...
    • Chad Horohoe may advise

Do some sleuthing around the org (see peeps who were called out above) to see what has been done and what might be feasible [COREY]


  • Large amount of untested code - big risk +++
  • Design workflow with devs - uncodified (<-Corey :-)) +1+1 ++
    • need more lead time
    • implicitly falls into "Ready for signoff" along w/ other things
  • Release Process, QA - no real process + +
  • What our release plan is: can we get more transparency or frequent updates about code & feature freeze, e.g. how many days until either and how on target we are? +1 + (see release process, QA, above)
  • Big gaps between Android production releases. Lots of repeated bug reports in OTRS of bugs that are already fixed in beta but have not been rolled out to production. +1+1 + +
    • can we get closer to continuous delivery