S79 Retrospective

Date	Jan 31, 2024
In sprint	@Anto Sgarlatta @Joyce Sato-Reinhold @Denis Dovganyuk @Duncan Brain @Sayaka Ono @Ebert Mota @Gursimran Singh @David Trapp @Loic Sans @Kevin Cussen @Navdeep Dhammu
At retro	@David Trapp @Anto Sgarlatta @Duncan Brain @Denis Dovganyuk @Loic Sans @Sayaka Ono
Recording	Not recorded

Background

This retro is for the S79: Thursday, January 18th - Wednesday, January 31st

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 (S78) retro is here: S78 Retrospective

Discussion topics:

Re-jiggering stand-ups?

Things I value in stand-up	Things that don’t work for me

Things I value in stand-up	Things that don’t work for me
The chance to see everyone and have some social interaction x 4	Timing! Mornings are my most productive time for collaboration and strategic thinking. Stand-ups and the many small tasks that inevitably flow from them feel like they derail that productivity and creativity.
Opportunity to discuss high priority or emerging issues	Lots of repetition - a meeting with 4 participants is repeated 4 times.
Understanding the context of what everyone is working on and being able to follow-up on things I’m interested in x 2	Feels very rote. Stand-ups are a bare-bones tool to raise activities where multiple individuals can meaningfully contribute. It doesn’t feel like that’s the output right now. x 2
I like the bot - having a written log of what is going on is helpful for following-up on topics of interest.

Questions:

How useful are cross-team updates? Do engineers find what grants we’re writing interesting? Does Farmer success find the side-effects of updating to a newer version of React router useful?
Is stand-up the right medium for socialization

Proposals:

Focus on blockers at stand-up
Discuss movement of tickets through kanban process? Most useful for engineering team
Give complete update on the agile bot and then only discuss areas where you need support or to collaborate on a problem
Optional “Games day” for socialization (1 hour every 2 weeks or so)
Weekly check-up on Mondays to lay out the goals for the week

Decision:

Will try out no stand-ups for 1 week and then check in on Feb 12, 2024

Start doing	Stop doing	Keep doing	Shout outs

Start doing	Stop doing	Keep doing	Shout outs
Define scope, create tickets and point them before sprint planning. Create a specific “Usability“ label to use on Jira, to report usability issues and design improvement in general Idea to throw in a low hanging usability improvement in every sprints.		Bug bash! The power of sanity in a concentrated little package for minor releases and patches Sanity for major releases	@Loic Sans for wrangling some incredible designs for animals @Sayaka Ono for diligence and excellent communication The engineering team for becoming more comfortable with patching (and putting out a string of hotfixes) @Denis Dovganyuk for his dedication to doing what needs to be done and learning non-stop @Larisse Cavalcante for telling our story @David Trapp for building our presence in the world and enabling strategic partnerships and a future where LiteFarm supports itself @Anto Sgarlatta for her great initiative on our successful first bug bash

Action items:

Review previous retro’s action items

@Lite Farm to put together a proposal on how team meeting cadence looks

Rollover action items from last time

@Denis Dovganyuk to begin labeling bugs with “Inconsistent reproducibility” and “Usability”

@Lite Farm to schedule a team discussion on the appropriate mechanisms for verifying a release will be successful (e.g. bug free)

Look into Jira: is there a way to calculate and track the portion of time spent on feature vs tech debt @Anto Sgarlatta

Make sure each sprint has a few tech debt tickets, even when the focus of the sprint is feature development @Anto Sgarlatta

@Anto Sgarlatta to discuss current implementation of app styling with @Loic Sans during next 1-on-1

Begin a Confluence doc on things you want to learn and things you’re interested in teaching and then schedule sessions around them @Anto Sgarlatta