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2025-01-13 Iteration 1 notes

2025-01-13 Iteration 1 notes

Owned by Jeffrey Wagner
Last updated: Jan 23, 2025 by James Eastwood
6 min read

Today’s goals

  • Schedule daily standups (USA and AUS)

    • USA standups - 2 PM eastern/1 PM Central/11 AM Pacific

    • AUS standups - 2.45 pm PT

  • Schedule retrospective, stakeholder meeting, prioritization meeting for next Thursday

    • It would be nice to have everyone present for the same meeting for this, but we’d have to fight time zones to do it.

      • JE – How about retrospective+prioritization meeting Thursday the 23rd at 5 PM Eastern (lead team timeslot)?

        • JC – Works for me, since I have FF release right after, so I’m online anyway

        • MT – That’d work for me.

      • JE – Stakeholder meetings are already partially handled by existing recurring workgroup meetings.

        • JW – Some infrastructure areas have a lack of stakeholders - Interchange interop stuff doesn’t get much feedback, same with PDB loading and upcoming PTM workflow.

        • MT – Some meetings are infra stakeholder meetings. Internal benchmarking, QCSubmit, etc meetings. So we could either keep those and possibly evolve further, or we could start again from a blank slate.

        • JE – If current meetings are getting cancelled frequently, we should look at consolidating/collapsing meetings.

        • JE – Let’s revisit this at retrospective

      • JW – MT, JC, JE, ZB: Availability to do one consolidated “everyone” version of these as late as 7 PM Eastern/6 Central/4 Pacific every other week?

      • JW – JM, LW: Ability to do a meeting 1-3 hours earlier every other week?

  • Zenhub account creation/intro

  • Review Proposed procedures (below)

  • Pick tickets

 

Proposed procedures

Meetings

  • Daily standups, split by time zones:

    • MT + JW + JC + JE ( + LW if possible)

    • JM + LW + JW ( + JE if possible)

  • Kickoff meetings every other Mon (Tues AUS, x2 for time zones as above)

  • Stakeholder meetings (discuss how many/how frequently to have these to get relevant audience, eg. shirts lab members)

  • Postmortem + Prioritization meeting every other Thursday (Fri AUS) (hopefully consolidated into a single meeting)

Ticket lifecycle:

  • Adding tickets to New Items - Anyone adds at any time

  • Triaging “New Items” into Iceboxes/Backlogs/Current iteration - Only happens in prioritization meeting

    • Exception: Leads and PM can move “New Items” tickets to current iteration or backlog mid-sprint, but MUST make a brief post on some slack channel that we will make justifying the action. These posts will all be added to postmortem agenda, so if folks think it was inappropriate or process needs to be changed, they will be discussed.

  • Moving tickets into Current Iteration - Only happens during Iteration Planning

  • Once selected for Current Iteration, tickets are only moved between columns during standups/synchronous meetings

 

Retrospective notes

Personal feedback

  • MT

    • Brief synchronous touchpoints with everyone in the org were very helpful.

    • Consolidating operations into one place is a good goal, but we still have a ways to go. I ended up having more things clearly assigned to me by the end.We’ll need more iterations for ZenHub to capture the state of things.

    • I think we as an org need to do a better job of connecting our daily work into our longer-term objectives. Would eventually like everything to connect to roadmaps, and do picking top-down.

    • Still a lack of “ripe” things to pick right now - lots of things blocked/abandoned/low-priority.

  • JC

    • First ever sprint iteration, I liked that it kept me on task/prevented the need for continuous reprioritization. However there were things that popped up mid-iteration, and we could use the epics more put together.

    • I still have questions about datasets - Lexie just merged one and I’ll need to work on that, and Chris is doing some stuff and I don’t know how long that will take, and it’s not tracked on board. So figuring out how spontaneous things get on to the board is important.

  • JM

    • Overall I liked it. Was nice having a touchpoint at the start of the day.

    • Echo JC’s concern about spontaneous things. I’m not sure if I can action a task when I have enthusiasm/focus to do it if it’s not indicated by board state.

    • I can see reviews getting lost. So maybe current iteration shouldn’t include items needing review - Could be good to have a separate column for this, and the review assignment process could be improved.

  • LW

    • It was nice to have org-wide meeting every day.

    • Agree with JM and JC’s concerns about new tasks. It’s hard to know how a big task will be done at the start of the project, and I started them as giant tickets, and kinda got gummed up in the middle wrt breaking it down.

    • It was helpful to some of have my priorities on the board

  • JW

    • Overall good

    • Surprised at how much effort it required. Spent most of the week prior to the iteratio getting stuff ready. I don’t think I got even 10% the way required to sort and break stuff down.

    • The synchronous progression of work has been a positive

    • In previous iterations, I didn’t know what the columns meant. Now after going through once, it will make sorting issues easier.

    • One benefit is that two weeks ago, I met with LW and we did a lot of valuable prioritisation. It was very helpful in making priorities clear and allowing joint sorting

  • JE

    • What I wanted to say has largely been covered - It’s great to get the team together once a day, even if it’ll only work time zone wise for part of the year. Lots more face time than I regularly have with JM and LW.

    • It’s been good to have a sense of what everyone is doing. This is a huge positive.

    • Think future planning work and breaking tasks down is mostly one-time work. Once we get backlog pruned, it’ll be easy to keep it pruned in the future. One of my goals is that this can help me become useful in prioritizing/planning work. May need a different meeting.

    • Agree with MT’s comments about trying to connect things to the roadmap better. We need to have a clear and shared understanding of what our roadmap is and how our work feeds into it.

    • Generally excited, this met my goals for the first iteration, looking forward to improving the process.

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Items from prior week

  • How can we make the (IGNORE) columns go away?

    • JE – Can unselect those pipelines from daily feed and collapse them in board view.

  • How can we make irrelevant PRs go away? (ex “testing X in CI” and to a smaller extent bot PRs)

    • Treat like user PRs and put them straight into Current Iteration

    • Or put them in an IGNORE column

  • Is the PR column flow good/does it need changing?

    • JM – suggest we split Awaiting Review out from Current Iteration so reviews don’t get lost

  • How should we handle mid-sprint task subdivision? (suggestion: yes, anyone can do this)

    • Yes, anyone can do this

  • How should we handle user issues/PRs that come in mid-iteration? (suggestion: user reports always go into Current Iteration)

    • We will put new PRs and user reports into Current Iteration

    • Anyone who gets a user report is empowered to put it in Current Iteration

  • Should Friday (the day after the sprints) be scheduled for some activity (ex prioritization)?

    • No good way to work out differences in time zones

  • We moved the nagl and interchange releases from New Issues to Current Iteration

  • I approved a PR that was merged before the standup, which caused it to already be in the “closed” column before we talked about it. Should we change automation so these don’t get automatically whisked away?

  • The sage-2.1.0 PR ticket doesn’t make sense, since we want to progress it, but not in this form. It will require meetings and stuff. So what do we do with the card corresponding to the PR?

  • Dataset longevity doesn’t have an epic, but does have tasks and a project page. When do we make new epics and who can link to/modify them?

  • This morning there were a bunch of items in New Issues already assigned to Jen - How should we action these moving to other columns?

  • How do we want to use sub-issue functionality?

  • How do we action PRs to close ZenHub issues mid-sprint?

  • Shut down check-ins channel?