Retrospective notes 2021.03.03 - ISISComputingGroup/ibex_developers_manual GitHub Wiki

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

Items from this retrospective

New planning site

  • 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

Why are some people quiet in pointing tickets etc

  • 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

Adding flash reviews to release notes

  • 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

Spread of ticket sizes

  • 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