Wikimedia Apps/imported/Retrospective-November 13 2014

Previous Retrospective Actions

• Finish reviewing Nearby blog post [Dan] DONE
• Concerns about the robustness of Wikidata given its importance to mobile work was a major concern. Related actions include: DONE
  • Continue to express these concerns to Directors, Damon, Lila
  • Review Maryana's "Asks" doc: https://docs.google.com/a/wikimedia.org/document/d/1g94w8kouuyQncmixTzQtWpYhN2p42lJ1irN6kxZVoOM/edit#
  • Begin building app features with Wikidata to illustrate pain points and use cases
    • Dan will be talking to Lydia and Daniel about our impact on WikiData

Worked Well

• Spending time with Dmitry and Bernd on tweaking and finessing <3
• Apple releases went faster than expected \o/
• Time off! :) +1
• Velocity of Android app progress +1
• Poaching code from android for iOS - queries for search improvements
• Dan's time allocation, I'm pretty much 95% on apps right now +1
• Building the app roadmap
• Lead images look awesome! +1!+1+1+1
• Using wikidata short descriptions for all the things
• Wikidata integration in 3 places
• Alpha builds working again.

Worked Poorly

• iOS data refactor still bogged down for a while, but making better progress once the integration started
• Need moar iOS developers! +1
• Moar QA for Android app; need time to let code gelatinize
  • Rummana and Elena will be starting soon (1 FTE total)
  • Dan + Kristen meeting with R, E, and Greg Monday to talk about how working with the team will go
  • Specialist's Guild can provide backup QA (24 hr turnaround!); will give them next release candidate
  • Release process: making release candidates ahead of time (we'll need to get better/more regimented at this to coordinate with QA peeps)
  • Tomasz can help with this?
• Need more time for bug fixes/cleanup. Spending around 3 days on that at beginning of sprint on Android.
  • more eyes on the code! Another Android engineer?
• More blog posts
  • Desire for us to socialize our work more
  • Action! Blog post for lead images [DMITRY]
  • Action! Blog post for wikidata descriptions for search [DAN]
• Socializing Nearby and all the new stuff we have in the pipeline (what's our story)
  • Moiz thinks we should have somethign really meaty before showing off to the world

Confuses Us

• Objective C. +1 Swiftly swift!
  • Dan will be doing some follow-up on this
• How is iOS going to catch up without additional resources for the next few months +1 let's get some hiring done hopefully!
• Material design; what does it mean and when are we going to do it?
  • How are we going to translate the design principles in to engineering tasks?
  • Full redesign or just "materialist approach" to what's coming up?
  • Action! Vibha will send around links and possibly set up a meeting to dive in this more [Vibha]
• the new iOS 8 TestFlight is confusing to use so far
  • will try with external beta testers to iron out the kinks
• still unsure of Wikidata's capacity to handle our load (may be a blocker for all the features we want to implement)
• End of year sprint and dates [Kristen]