S78 Retrospective

Background

This retro is for the S78: Friday, January 5th - Wednesday, January 17th

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 (S74) retro is here: S74 Retrospective

Discussion topics:

• After action review (AAR) for https://github.com/LiteFarmOrg/LiteFarm/releases/tag/v3.6.2

  • User perspective: When editing a revenue or expenses it appeared that the user was being kicked out of LiteFarm (in reality the browser was navigating several pages back).

  • Technical perspective: Broswer navigation takes place in several ways. Pertinent method is a custom function Jimmy built - to help persist data in multi-page forms; this works by pushing certain routes to a history stack. These are popped when you cancel or finish a form. We introduced a redirect such that when you popped these routes it took you too far.

  • Learnings:

    • Duncan found other forms (specifically in Finances) that navigation was broken too

    • Decided to do redirects instead of changing routes to keep consistent URLs; …

    • The hook that handles navigation conditions programmatically is a bad idea - evolved from 3 lines to a whole soup of edge case logic and no tests; there may be ways to simplify this or just allow the browser to handle navigation

      • Call this “route tech debt”?

    • We are doing some “very weird things with navigation” - logic was generic enough that it was very difficult to troubleshoot - might be easier to make it explicit, e.g. “If clicked from X, return to X after”.

    • Some requirements are asking for changes to the default browser behaviour - e.g. if a user clicks back after submitting a form, they shouldn’t be taken back into the flow.

  • Success: good patch and a good re-write of routes

  • On-going concerns: Lots of bugs around use of “<“ and back button; SPIKE to at least understand the shape and depth of navigation issues

• After action review (AAR) for https://github.com/LiteFarmOrg/LiteFarm/pull/3073

  • Email field provided was not appropriately populating on the user detail creation screen - because this email field was read-only a user was not able to create a username / password based user account

  • Technical explanation: @Joyce Sato-Reinhold; subtle and difficult to catch from the coding end

  • Learnings:

    • No route change here - just showing different components. Despite this, we’re using navigation. Instead we should just be handling this through React.

    • Look for conditional jsx rendering

    • There may not be a “safe” release - eschewing sanity was a mistake

    • Coded in a high risk way - esp. changing routes - not raised as a concern as this became more obvious

    • Think about cascading issues / top level changes will have many tendrils x 2

    • Bias: it needs to happen within this time frame or not at all

    • Should everyone be somewhat involved in release-scope items? Joyce reviewed PRs but wasn’t part of the earlier design processes

    • Fall 2023 was a fairly hectic period

    • We sped up the releases cadence to 1) get code to users quickly and 2) to become more comfortable with releases and 3) get more comfortable quickly responding to bugs - these objectives were successful albeit at the cost of some fairly large bugs.

    • Patch itself went really well - successful and enjoyable

• State of automated testing, specifically around https://github.com/LiteFarmOrg/LiteFarm/pull/2931

  • Is this ready to be merged in?

    • Yes, but they won’t pass initially - we’ll need to do some refactors afterwards

    • Report back on scope of coverage

    • Devs will need to meet and get on the same page

  • E2E is not a silver bullet; need to think through a more holistic testing approach

• Sanity week

  • Did I miss something about why there wasn't one?

    • Tacit groupthink that it was “not that big” - just a “cool patch”

    • We hadn’t started planning a full sanity and release for the month prior

      • Sanity is a big investment with a lot of planning; is this in line with our goal of speeding up release process? How does sanity evolve in light of this goal? Team bug hunt day?

• Tech debt

  • As we build more new features we create more tech debt – it feels that more tech debt could be prioritised

  • Engineering team responsible for bringing tech debt themes to grooming and prioritizing into each sprint
    
    

Action items: