2021-05-05

Items from last retro

  • Managing security issues - current org. concern because of many different types of security vulnerabilities

  • Ticket, PR & Branch clean-up - do a proper cleanup over the shutdown, and as we notice them

  • Short-staffed when urgent workload is high - point for 4 weeks of work and do Fridays if not doing support

  • Themed sprints

Future Ideas wiki page

  • Used for long-term planning, “idea repository”. Should we maintain this?

    • people haven’t added anything in there recently

    • unsure of how to keep track of things in the long term

    • good place for things that are nice to do and would like to when we have the time

    • great place for tasks for placement/graduates

  • Keep it

Planning Poker Rooms - anonymous voting

  • traditionally the selected cards are not anonymous

    • would we prefer anonymous, or displaying the vote cast?

  • No strong opinions, keep it as is

Experiment Controls email - using too much?

  • hasn’t bothered anyone

  • good to see what goes in and out

All releases seem to be stressful

  • this round has been relatively calm, but it has still had its moments

    • there have been discussions in the past, but is it worth thinking about it and revisiting it towards the end of this calendar year?

  • do deployments much earlier, 2 weeks is too late; can deploy early is release is ready

  • release was getting pushed back because of MUSR, stop doing that - release for all instruments and do a MUSR patch release late

  • make sure to tell the scientists that we are deploying to establish hard deadline; scientists also want a window, so they know when to be available

  • don’t delay the release unless it breaks instruments - if not ready before the start of release sprint, don’t add it

This sprint has been stressful

  • need time to decompress after this sprint

  • pushing ourselves hard to get things ready for cycle - this is affecting morale

  • we should think about ways to avoid this happening again

  • it has been a bit stressful but overall people feel ok

  • if it helps, can “dial-down” next sprint

Technical articles channel

  • we should send more technical articles round the group, should we have a channel?

    • don’t want people to feel obligated to read it

    • reading could be allocated as training time

    • see if people are okay with 2 chapters in a month, if not maybe 1 chapter

    • neutron training course was the same (though it was more on the physics side of things), while this could be more about software

  • this channel could be good training. Try to pick a book or online articles and discuss it at a code chat, see how it goes

Support tasks - 0 pointers or not

  • How are we counting support tasks? 0 pointers or not?

    • allowed to be 0, but if it takes time it shouldn’t be

    • burndown chart is -20 because of the support chunk

    • decide capacity according to trend and keep to it

  • carry on with support being 0 as long as it doesn’t take too much time

Second week in cycle too early for sprint review

  • is second week in cycle still too early for a sprint review? still busy on support.

    • always going to be hard and there’s always the possibility of support calls in the middle of it

    • maybe split the meetings to be “less interrupted” if something comes up, instead of having a long meeting

  • yes, split reviews and retrospectives.

Half an hour is too short for retrospective

  • Change meeting time to an hour