2020-03-04
We should update component stewards
Yes, this was missed after the last retrospective. Some combination of James, Kathryn and John to do.
Squish licenses
We are happy with what we have for the budget we have
Floating licenses/more licenses will cost more
There are lots of tickets completed 👍 There are lots of tickets also in ready 👎
Possible reasons:
Lots of support tickets (1/3rd of the sprint)
Lots of tickets leftover from EMU rush
We are not extremely unhappy about this as we got a lot done, but it would be good to manage it better
Suggestion: To encourage throughput we prioritize reworks and reviews over current tickets as well as new tickets.
Pros
These reworks and reviews are likely a higher priority than our current ticket so it fits in with our prioritization
It should encourage tickets to not hang around in ready and review and decreases their time from ready t complete
May encourage people to document their progress more on a ticket when they are recording what they have done prior to switching to a rework
Cons
More context switching
Switching state of a machine from one ticket to another takes time
Conclusion: This cannot be a blanket rule as there are many edge cases. For a sprint, we will try this. People should find a practical stopping point in their current ticket to do a rework if the situation arises. The metrics to decide on this will be: does everyone hate it? Has our throughput increased?
Should we create support tickets for all work for all instruments (SECI and IBEX) whether in cycle or not and whether we’re contacted individually or not
Yes, within reason.
The documentation is useful for future issues to create context
It should be recorded as support, otherwise, it seems we are pulling in tickets without the proper process
Helps to capture our effort
Support is defined as: if a scientist needs help
SECI tickets should be recorded only if they are of relevance to IBEX
If a support call took very little time e.g. writing the ticket would take more time it may not be worth it
It stops being time-effective or useful to others
If a support call is one of a common theme we should record all them together as a tally to identify areas of the system we should improve
We should demo more in sprint reviews
Yes, we need to take steps towards this.
DEMO should be deployed to earlier to give people a chance to set up their demo
There is now a reminder for a few of us to remind the group we need to deploy at the start of the week so it is organised earlier
We don’t necessarily need to demo on DEMO it can be on our own machine
Though demoing on DEMO can be useful to point out issues surrounding performance, state that we did not experience on our own machine etc.
It is a good chance for a dress rehearsal prior to scientist demos (we are a more forgiving audience)
Should we try again with inviting scientists to sprint reviews? Relying on “proxy” product owners has failed multiple times recently
We are happy with the current process of having separate scientist demos.
Getting them to come is difficult and would extend reviews a lot.
However, we should be more strict in demoing to scientists.
We should organise these as part of the release (added to the ticket template)
Clean up after upgrade
Upgrade process was leaving a trail of mounted network disks. Upgrade scripts should clean up after themselves.
There is a ticket for this. https://github.com/ISISComputingGroup/IBEX/issues/5208
Dashboard bug: This was an unnecessary own goal. Why did our testing (system, automated, manual) not catch these?
Reasons why it wasn’t caught:
Wouldn’t have been seen unless we had neutrons
We haven’t got 100% coverage
The push for EMU made us rush
Mistakes can be made
Our simulation isn’t very strong for pretending we have neutrons
Actions:
We should be more aware to use TDD
It is noted that it is difficult to know what to test on legacy code and that it is easy to spot a bug when you know what bug you’re looking for
If we demoed it may possibly have been caught, we should be more strict with demos
Positives:
We were fast and reactive with our fix
We are more aware of this now and know we should be more careful in testing and reviewing
EMU: Switch back to SECI failed because of the presence of 32-bit Open Genie components. Is it likely to occur on other muon instruments? How should we avoid?
This is now fixed
There may be more banana skins
As part of our migrations, we should test that we can go back and plan for a possible switchback
This has been added into the steps here: https://github.com/ISISComputingGroup/ibex_developers_manual/wiki/Migrate-an-Instrument-Control-PC
This was tricky to catch
We should have a set of standard things to test across similar instruments e.g. motors for refl and start/stop for every one
Linter is perceived as slow by some instruments. The linter may not really be slow, but is perceived as such by some instruments. How can we make ourselves more conscious of performance?
We have a ticket and ideas for speeding things up. https://github.com/ISISComputingGroup/IBEX/issues/5210
HDDs rather than SSDs have slowed us down here, there is a plan to upgrade.
Manual tests should have time limits.
Demoing and testing on demo should help us with this.
We should try to be aware of how our code changes performance.
Memory leak has added to this concern
We should consider writing more squish performance tests
We should check with the SAG how important they think performance enhancements are
ScriptServer may help with the speed
We should add linting to the script server
Make a standard email to send release notes out when we make a release. Release process should include sending this out.
Yes, added to the process in creating a release
Standard email format (not necessarily a good email, please consider it’s contents).