ERM Sprint 63 Retrospective

Agenda

  1. Review Retro Board (10 mins)
  2. Voting (2 mins)
  3. Discussion (15 mins)
  4. Summary Actions (3 mins)


Apologies 

Retrospective


Personal highlights

  • More comfortable with project structure and processes
  • Happy with the rhythm currently present in the project sprints
    • Nice to see this is being felt outside of development, in the  feature / story preparation stages
  • Better understanding of Grails and the project technologies, although at the expense of the first iteration taking longer.
  • Code reuse between the 2 UI modules.
  • Had time to pick up smaller tasks

What went well

  • Feedback loop from testing to bugs being raised
  • Transition form internal orgs to mod-organization-storage went fairly smoothly
  • The management of the dev process seemed to be smoother.

What caused problems

  • This project is often at bleeding-edge, and that can cause confusion as to where to find code or process that might be similar to what we want to achieve, to allow for reuse
    • We're doing Phase 3 planning at the moment, including looking at potential (future) module dependencies
    • We intend to flag these dependencies to other teams as soon as we have completed assessing the technical approach we intend to take
    • The Washington meeting (June 2019) is an opportunity to negotiate scheduling early development of potential dependencies
    • Improvements to release management for Stripes/UI modules may help mitigate a bit of the bleeding edge pain during delivery cycles
    • We're also looking at how to accommodate system analysis as part of the onboarding / knowledge share process
  • Testing can be problematic when we rely on 3rd party plugins, eg, Find Org
  • Onboarding time and learning curve for Grails and related techs we use are often high at the beginning of a developers involvement.
  • JIRA is often not updated inline with the projects processes.
    • See discussion notes below


Discussion Notes

JIRA is often not updated inline with the projects processes

  • The goal here is to 
    • have accurate current status of progress and obstacles
    • reduce friction of Jira admin for all team members (including developers, testers, PO and scrum master)
  • Leaving assignee unchanged helps make it easier to track work that has been 'owned' by a particular person
  • This doesn't help identify who has responsibility for an item right now, although a combination of other fields may help
    • Tester Assignee field could be used to identify who is responsible for QA
    • Status of In Code Review should mean it's FAO Component Lead 
    • Status of In QA  should mean it's FAO Tester Assignee 
    • Status of For Review  should mean it's FAO Product Owner (the Jira Project Lead )
    • Status of For Release  should mean it's FAO Lead Dev
  • If a PR hasn't passed code review, the Jira issue status is not changed back to Open  or In Progress  - the re-work is managed through Github to-and-fro
  • Automating Jira transitions from Gtihub PR status could be done, if the integration has been set up.
    • Needs some verification
    • Automation will only be effective if only one PR is raised against each issue: exceptions would have to be manually handled
  • Backlog / Kanban board filters in Jira have been set up to make it easier for leads and testers to identify items that need action based on status, rather than Assignee
    • Checking these should be part of daily routine

Still to consider: 

  • Inferring current state of progress based on Jira status still relies on developers picking up and (self-)assigning issues
  • Initial issue assignment could be handled in Sprint Planning. 
    • We do currently indicate who might pick up a piece of work in Sprint Planning log, but this isn't always reflected in Jira
    • Some items will inevitably be left in the backlog or arise during the sprint
  • A story will often have front-end and back-end work. 
    • These can (and should) be distinguished by separate subtasks 
    • Subtasks can be separately assigned
    • Separate PRs can be raised against each subtask to support automated Jira transition
  • But then, who should the story be assigned to? The PO?

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