S67 Retrospective (August 2023 release)

Background

This retro is for the August 2023 release. Sanity began on Monday, July 31st and we released on Friday, August 4th.

Retrospective

Discussion topics:

• Changes to https://lite-farm.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/LITEFARM/pages/1339064341?

• Changes to kanban structure or workflow? https://lite-farm.atlassian.net/jira/software/c/projects/LF/boards/10

  • Don’t batch move tickets from status to status (because it causes priority ordering to be lost)

  • Adopt priority indicator on tickets

  • Don’t show icebox column?

  • Who puts a ticket into language review? QA makes the decision to put in “Release ready” or “Needs language review” based on presence of language tags

• Code freeze?

  • Freeze before sanity week

  • Separating bug squash from sanity?

• Testing strategy

  • Split release into two segments: bug squash then sanity

  • What do developers do during sanity week?

    • Could be testing

    • Could be other activities

• Tester strategy

  • Ask for more dedication and put payment towards time involved?

    • Cost benefit analysis of manual testing assistance against automated bug detection on CI

  • Less “come and go as you please”

  • In advance of sanity, ask people there availability and try to “chunk” them into different categories (e.g. crop plans, locations, finances)

  • There is a disadvantage to giving people a script or pre-loading data. You don’t see bugs that exist because of poorly understood dependencies

• Friday release (why not wednesday/monday?)

  • Relic of sanity week and time to resolve bugs

  • Can be revisited with discussion of restructuring release process

• Release more often - maybe instead discuss release more often

  • Potentially reviewing at the start of each sprint, “Are we ready to release”?

    • A yes would initiate the release script / communications with the community

  • Still maintain a static release date, but be more flexible based on features / where the code is at each sprint

    • How would we involve the community in ad hoc releases?

  • A key factor for the static release date far in advance is to allow for advising testers for sanity

    • Having dedicated testers could potentially remove this complexity

• S66

  • estimated story points

  • google meets

  • tech debt in every sprint

Action items: