2021-03-31

From last last retro

  • Monday reviews were working well until this week (mostly with cycle stresses)

  • Doing well for using medium and low

  • We haven’t been putting system tickets in because the review column is long and we’re trying to get everything in for cycle

  • Release notes PR system we are happy with

  • We haven’t done games on Friday coffee for a couple of weeks

    • This may be work pressures but it would be good to make a bit of an effort to organise/join it

Items from the last retro

  • New planning site is getting easier

  • Re-voting and the chair starting the discussion has helped to improve the discussion

  • If a flash review needs release notes then it is not a flash review

  • Big tickets aren’t scary we should encourage people to pick them up when it is not possible to split them up

How to manage security issues

  • Could use the private git-repo or Microsoft teams board and link from Github

  • There are lots of different types of security vulnerabilities and there is a current concern from the organisation about security

  • The important thing is that we have enabled a conversation about it in planning

Action: Chris MS Will ask Anthony from FIT how they do it

Ticket, PR and branch cleanup in long shutdown

  • We should do this as we notice them

  • We should also do a proper cleanup over the shutdown

  • Most of the backlog is surprisingly valid

  • Has been added to the long shutdown list

What can we do to ease situations like the one we are currently in where we are short staffed (for very valid reasons), but when the urgent workload is high?

  • Shall we do a 5-week sprint?

    • We have APRs, new starters, IBEX training, lots of stressful things coming up

    • Let’s be careful what we add to the sprint

    • Still keep a bucket

    • We think 5-week sprint is better than 3 week

  • Can we only point for 4 weeks of work and do Fridays if we’re not doing support?

    • Concern is that we underestimate Friday tickets and overestimate their importance

    • Fridays are nice to have so may relieve stress

    • Or could do technical bookkeeping tickets e.g. the above-mentioned Ticket, PR and branch cleanup (we’ll leave that choice up to the dev)

    • Fridays do help user experience improvement

  • Yes we’re going to do this

  • Let’s talk about this after the fact so we can organise the start of cycle sprints in a more solid way

  • We like these ideas

  • We can change the length of sprints to ensure releases are created in good time for the cycle

    • We can do a full release earlier on and a patch release later

    • In the long shutdown, we can do a few releases so we are ready

    • Can we get more of a manual release process into squish to reduce this

Themed sprints

  • Decide on one or two themes for a sprint

  • Prioritise the theme in their own columns

  • Have a couple of people dedicated to each theme with others helping them and others focusing more on support

  • Needs management because we aren’t fully sharing that information with the rest of the team

  • People can take on different themes and lead each time so it is shared around

    • Ensure people have rotated around so we don’t lose the ability to work on lots of different parts of the system

  • Support can be set as a theme

  • We should bear this in mind in planning

  • Kathryn will upload document with idea of how to manage the project with themes and variable sprint lengths