S72 Retrospective

Date	Oct 18, 2023
In sprint	@Anto Sgarlatta @Joyce Sato-Reinhold @Denis Dovganyuk @Duncan Brain @Sayaka Ono @Javier Antonio Hernandez De Paz @David Trapp @Loic Sans @Kevin Cussen (until Oct 14th)
At retro	@Anto Sgarlatta @Joyce Sato-Reinhold @Denis Dovganyuk @Duncan Brain @Sayaka Ono @Loic Sans
Recording

Background

This retro is for the S72: Thursday, Oct 5th - Wednesday, Oct 18th

Please add comments before the meeting! We’ll take a few minutes to add additional comments and discuss, then put together action items to operationalize suggestions.

Last sprints (S71) retro is here: S71 Retrospective

Discussion topics:

Sprint estimation – sync or async styles? Thoughts on planning poker?
- @Joyce Sato-Reinhold thinks: nice to have everyone’s input on each ticket. Async interface nice (+1 @Duncan Brain)
- @Duncan Brain is planning poker useful? Estimation is personalized per person. When sync it was many hours of meetings each sprint between planning, estimation, backlog…
  - Time to start using estimated points on Jira?
  - PR Reviews velocity?
- @Anto Sgarlatta estimates don’t have to be exact; different perspectives on difficulty will even out by having everyone estimate. For contract metrics too it makes sense to have everyone / more people estimate. Our estimates might also move towards agreement over time. Conducting meetings (see backlog refinement below) where we go over the tickets would give us some chance to discuss the tickets (more valuable than straight voting). Discussing why votes are different is more valuable than straight averaging.
  - Estimation could also be part of the technical breakdown of a feature - after the technical document lead for that feature presents the breakdown, estimation is done together by the team
  - This would also help with estimating the scope + time required to deliver a feature
  - Feel free to hold estimates loosely
  - Estimates could be thought of as belonging more to the team than to individual developers (+1 from @Joyce Sato-Reinhold)
  - Time-based estimation also can lead to unwarranted time stress when tackling tickets of a certain point estimation
- @Sayaka Ono agrees we should estimate on ticket complexity (not time)
Claiming tickets vs assigning?
- @Duncan Brain & @Sayaka Ono prefer assignment and @Joyce Sato-Reinhold prefers picking so we can do a mix. Assignments will also happen with some input

Start doing	Stop doing	Keep doing	Shout outs

Start doing

Stop doing

Keep doing

Shout outs

Maybe switching to no meeting Fridays? (+2)
- @Anto Sgarlatta and @Loic Sans have good past experience with keeping Fridays meeting-free. It’s a chill + wind-down day.
- Reframe no-meetings day to deep focus day? With an understanding that this is role-dependent in terms of what it means for meetings. But no cadence meetings
Backlog refinement meetings - the week before bugfix sprint starts we should refine

no meeting Tuesday after a holiday (+1!) (Wednesday?)

@Anto Sgarlatta For being a fast reviewer !

All of the team for the great work this sprint adjusting to new scope.

@Anto Sgarlatta Because for me you are like that bee, actually you want to try do your best in the very short period of time.

Action items:

Review previous retro’s action items

@Anto Sgarlatta to create a document detailing a proposal with details from above for us to look at together (note: this particular sprint won’t have much to estimate)

@Anto Sgarlatta to schedule our backlog refinement meeting this sprint, prior to bugfix week

@David Trapp to answer – how does no meetings FRIDAY sound to you? It would be weekly.

Have first Friday deep focus day Friday October 20, 2023 and weekly thereafter pending @David Trapp's approval

Actually stand up during stand-up – at least one day