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What did we do well?

  • Developer calls have been better at sticking to the time
  • Weekly meetings & stand-ups to get updated
  • Longer sprints are better
  • Coming back to story-owners/epic maintainers
  • Everyone got familiar with docker
  • Well organized agenda during hackathon, convenient rooms
  • Very nice and friendly people in project
  • Technologies used
  • well organized hackathon
  • We have a quite good and active DevOps team
  • Documenting the decisions on confluence is good (smile)
  • Hackathons are very helpful to discuss the issues
  • PR's are reviewed swiftly
  • People
  • As a new member I feel greatly welcomed
  • Very happy that the team has bonded that much more
  • Nice climate in the team
  • people spend time trying to understand your problem and help
  • teamwork + work together even though geographically separated


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What should we have done better?

Process

  • Not sure about the new sprint model (feedback: we just started)
  • scrum process is still bad - 4 weeks sprint, no product owner, no team wide planning, too much JIRA flow, too less actual benefits of flow. (feedback: we now have story owners)
  • sometimes the development and deployment process are quite messy. Is maybe needed to define and follow some guidelines.
  • Testing before releases

Communication

  • Too much talk (has gotten better though)
  • Speed of decision making → need to just decide! (feedback: use mailing list + some things are complex/require design process)
  • Where are the research parts? (feedback: initiative→ propose youself)
  • Description of tickets in JIRA could be more detailed. sometimes they are not very expressive (we could add fields to the description like: current state, expected state) (feedback: initiative→ ask story owners for more detail (they can delegate). Also: confluence pages (requirements/design) + current state is original slidewiki.org. Also see improvements below)
  • Sometimes giving tickets for services to new people is problematic because service maintainers missing giving an introduction and do not explain what have to be done how (feedback: see above + improvements below)
  • Bringing new devleopers into the project is incredibly difficult & time consuming (feedback, see above + improvements below)
  • Locate original programmers of some component or service to ask question about doubt. With owners is more easy but still difficult. (feedback: use git blame or look at commits of file)

Tools

  • Phantom errors - random change of some hash values in custom_modules/ folder
  • Deploying changes to submodules is very hard!
  • Fluxible is so(!!) time consuming
  • React & flux are still awfull
  • Style guide? Need es-lint check (better now than fixing everything in future)
  • No semantic-UI please
  • Using atom when webstorm is free for universities



Suggested Improvements retrospective participants
People

  • We are >18 people → one big team. => split responsibilities to max 5 person team
  • Split responsibilities → service owners, frontend team, devops team, search team, etc... (feedback: we try to have everyone work on everything as much possible (front-end, back-end). We already have story/epic owners)
  • We may benefit from peer code reviews (feedback: we try, but resource problem → assign more people to PR's yourself)

Tools

  • We need a monitoring solution → google analytics, Newrelic, datadug (feedback: we do this → always looking for new open source solutions)
  • Refactor to react stateless component if possible
  • More unit tests (feedback: yes!)

Process

  • Documentation
    • Shorter discussion in confluence (making decisions) (feedback: mailing list for decisions. Perhaps use question-options-choice template used for discussion on http://tinyurl.com/zv7owof )
    • More developers blogs
    • A single document or section-by-section HTML  linked pages that explains how to deploy system
    • More knowledge spreading / interdisciplinary sessions
    • Developer documentation with worked out examples  + how to add /change different types of things
    • Better connection to open source community
    • More documentation for external devs
  • Retrospectives more often
  • Improve forward planning + road map (feedback: in progress, we have user stories 2017 excel sheet)
  • Improve managing expectations of trial partners (feedback: in progress, we have user stories 2017 excel sheet, and form for trials to indicate what they want → https://goo.gl/forms/vpE2XREAAShaLSFs1Ben Wulff where can we see results? Should we add these in user stories 2017 excel sheet)
  • Focus more on graphical design of our platform
  • Delete merged branches (feedback: done during hackathon → everyone is present → "can we delete this?")

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