2021-03-03

Items from last retrospective

Monday reviews are still working well
We’re better at being stricter for high/medium/low
We have now set general meetings to have alternative hosts
When systems tickets get added to review (mostly by CMS then they will be pointed based on expected review time)
Release notes PR system is still well liked
Games on Friday coffee has attracted more people, which is good

No need to add ticket numbers for each story when pointing
We should start the session afresh before each planning to stop phantom accounts hanging round
It’s ok not to have don’t-knows on the priority points

People have different communication styles
We should discuss estimates but it might be worth taking less time on wildly different estimates
Quieter people tend to be unsure and voting on gut reaction (which is fine) and feel like they learn more after the discussions
We will try the chair being the first person to input in the discussion of points
By missing out on the quieter people way may be losing the concept of how complex is it for the average developer

If it’s a flash review that needs something in the release notes it’s probably not a flash review
Flash reviews were originally created to be process-light
We just did a large change in how we did release notes, we should see what users think about this first. Next release we should discuss
If reviewing a flash review and you think it’s very user facing then ask them to put in release notes
When we do the instrument demos we should ask what people think of the release notes

Pair programming more would be good, we may be doing less of this remotely but it’s still happening
We could split tickets more but we’re pretty good at this
We should do more splitting up in an ad hoc way rather than up front as developers will know a bit more at that point
We should encourage newer developers to pick up big tickets too
We should ask at the end of planning if we have too many big tickets