Wikimedia Discovery/Meetings/Maps retrospective 2016-08-31

Format

This retrospective format is based on one from Scrum Breakfast: http://www.scrum-breakfast.com/2011/05/how-we-do-retrospective.html

Remember the "retrospective prime directive": 

• Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.

Previous action items

• Yuri: Discuss roadmap with team
  •  Done
  • Quarterly goals posted
  • Vision paper is old but public (not detailed)
• Katie: Will follow up with VE team; maybe define communication norms between teams
  •  Done
  • Have had several meetings between several people
  • Established new weekly checkin meetings with reps from both teams
• Julien: Will ping people to try to get UI patches unstuck
  •  Done, and the UI patch (frame around maps) was approved and merged.

What has happened since the last retro (August 8)?

• generation of tiles on new maps cluster is working
• support for tile generation and job scheduling via shell script (not yet deployed, but usable - we need to work on our definition of done)
• resolved all <maplink> blockers, to be enabled this week or early next
  • activation of <maplink> presented to Ops without any objection
• Frames around maps by default, or "frameless" option
• Map style (controls, popups) updated to match wikimedia's styleguide
• Addressed blockers for Polestar + WDQS integration
• Max created maps-scratch5 (= a VM to test changes before pushing them to prod)  omg, big news :D (probably not big to you, but I was wondering for sometime how to do that)
• got basic KPI working :)  https://grafana.wikimedia.org/dashboard/db/interactive-team-kpi   (not much data there yet, just started collecting)
• Lots of UI fixes
• We have waay more ideas than capability to implement them, which is a good thing (tm)
• Static map page when clicking on <maplink> without JS support

Team strengths

• awesome dev talent!
• we have great(?) ops support (yes, i meant Gehel, but other ops help too)
• Team needs little discussion to get things done
  • "just the right amount of discussion"
• We have very different strengths, complementing each other well

Ideas for improvement

• It seems I (Kevin) forgot to book a room for this retro
• getting another frontend dev would greatly help
• Announce user-affecting stuff in Tech News in advance?
  • Tech is moving quickly and is not pre-planned, so hard to communicate in advance
  • We do well with post-announcements
  • e.g. weekly ones that Chris does?
  • What channels? [maps-l]
  • Who does this well in the foundation?
    • Discovery generally does better than most with advance announcements
  • Guillaume mostly knows short-term, but even he doesn't really know the medium-term plans (not a problem, but reflects the problem)
  • Roadmap being developed by Yuri might help
  • Channel is less important if we don't know the content
  • Yuri: We should probably make a wiki page with medium-term plans, and publicize that
  • Important to clearly communicate anything coming up in a week or two. But we don't always know if/when new features will happen. For map frames, we didn't communicate to Chris early enough.
  • Could the roadmap page handle both "this month" and "several quarters"?
    • Roadmap page seems more for multiple quarters
    • Phab is the most accurate for near-term
  • Who are we trying to communicate to, and what do they expect?
    • For specific communities, talk to them there (e.g. village pumps). For general, maybe wikitech-l or facebook
• Why is it sooo hard to list team strengths? I'm sure we have some, but nothing comes to mind...
• Do we need to keep documentation up-to-date? Or are we ok?
  • 2 votes for "seems ok"
  • There is a ticket to generate/publish front-end docs. Docs are already in the code.
  • Do we have a simple "how to use maps" page for devs with sample code snippets
    • https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Extension:Kartographer/Developer_guide but no link on extension page; newer version locally with code samples but needs review
• More 3rd-party implementation of Kartographer
  • Docs ^ would help
  • After we have docs, can suggest to others that they integrate
• Phab board could use more cleanup

Action items

• Yuri: Publish roadmap 1-3 Q
• Yuri: Look into improving 1-3 week communication
• Yuri: Clean up phab board(s)
• Chris: Add mapframe change to Tech News - DONE
  • Too late? Nope. :)
• Julien: Publish integration code that I have (search, commons, wikidata) + prioritize online documentation with code examples
  • CREDIT demo? (next CREDIT: 9/7)
• Kevin: Stick with this retro format for next month (but get a room)