JM

Feeling pretty good. Enjoing daily check ins. Still some friction but far less. Think we’re getting better at handling fast-breaking/spontaneous stuff. One thing I did this cycle was breaking a big task into subtasks mid-iteration. It technically “broke the rules” but it contributed a lot to me feeling productive/staying on task this week.

JC

Probably a learning opportunity in how I put together my epic, felt like I was stuck. When things were moving I liked the process a lot more. It was helpful to keep on task and know my goals. (later) re: breaking the rules, we decided I should put together some of my scripts for managing/analyzing kubernetes utilization. We did this mid-iteration, but posted in the zenhub channel.

MT

Felt like this was a step backwards, I don’t think my productivity was utilized. Was mostly waiting on others for reviews/prioritization/feedback. There were more times than I’d prefer that I couldn’t execute on things. So felt like my throughput was lower in the past two weeks. Feel there’s a lot of room to improve on how we track things on ZenHub - Multi-day megatickets with shifting goals defeat the purpose of tracking work. I think it’s easy for the board to drift away from capturing true state, and I think this happened this iteration, instead tasks were driven by my github/slack/email inbox. I think I’m at my best when I can look at ZenHub feed and know what I need to do, and that things were in these other channels hurt productivity.

LW – How do you think the standups function in unblocking/slowing your productivity? Were reviews not getting picked up or people were picking them but not actioning them?

MT – Yes, that contributed but a larger part might have been that I didn’t pick enough work at the beginning of the iteration. Also several blockages had their roots in a lack of feedback from external (to our org) stakeholders.

LW – Regarding tasks in email/slack, were those because zenhub was depleted, or because new tasks weren’t added quickly enough.

MT - The latter, if I have too little on my daily list, I’m more prone to distraction.

LW

Like MT, thought this was a step backwards. I have a lot of the megatickets with shifting goals. So as they shifted the board didn’t reflect what I was actually doing. So I kinda solved this by opening new sub-tickets and added them directly to current iteration. But then others just sat there for a while. I think it will be difficult to fix when tickets can’t be updated mid-iteration. Not sure about more graceful ways to fix this than changing things mid-iteration. Otherwise I found the daily check-ins helpful. I’m unclear on when things get significant enough to get tracked on ZenHub (ex emails and slack), since sometimes my whole day will get sunk into those. So being able to track those on ZH would be helpful.

MT – This had kinda come up when I was doing iterations w/ ZB and JE last year. We set a goal by setting an 80-20 goal of having MOST work tracked on board, but allowing 20ish% to be untracked comms. So I think we’re best off if not everything is tracked, just a majority.

JW

I think me taking a few days off showed how this can kinda be a fragile system. I did find a need to go outside the system and review a bunch of stuff unassigned to me to unblock Matt, but it was nice to have a list of the blocking items conveniently. Agree with the idea of changing board state mid-iteration. On weds my check in with MT made me realize that there were a bunch of easy PRs that could be quickly reviewed, and I went “outside the system” to clear them quickly without being assigned.