2025-01-13 Iteration 1 notes

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?

• Can new tickets be added directly to organizational backlog or should they go through new issues?

2025-01-27 Iteration notes

• How to deal with QCA-DS PRs which operate on a different board

• JC came to last Friday’s iteration planning, but nobody else was there.

• How to deal with issues as they arise mid-iteration (triage)?

• Expectations around updating board outside of standup

2025_02_06 retrospective

How did this go? Ideas for improvement?

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 – 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.

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.

Procedural changes:

• Breaking into subtasks mid-iterations

  • Anyone can break big tasks into subtasks mid-iteration

• Triaging new issues mid-iteration

  • We’ll make an “urgent” column that will be reviewed first in each standup

• Expedited review without assignment

  • This is allowed, just self-assign and do it. But big/nontrivial PRs will still need assignment in standup.

• Expectations around updating board outside standups

  • This needs further iteration/discussion at future meetings. (rollover)

• One week iterations? (rollover)

(lots of discussion)

LW: How about we stick to two-week iterations but once a week (just the science team?) does some more shuffling than would happen in a standup

JW: I think sub-task breakdown should be allow mid-iteration, with some hope that metadata (like epochs?) is mapped into the new subtasks

MT – I’m strongly in favor of breaking big tasks down into subtasks mid-iteration.

LW – Rule could be “break it down and tell people at the next standup”

JW – Task breakdown could be done in 1:1s with leads, that way it’s kinda kosher to be adding new items to backlogs/icebox/new epics

MT – Hard to reason around this being a rule without clear guidelines on when board can be updated. Kinda touches on late-breaking issues.

JW – We could have an “urgent” column where late-breaking stuff goes, and we can immediately assign people and action it, but then we discuss it in the next standup

JM – Could each have a permanent “chaos” ticket where we assign an estimate when we get sucked into crazy stuff. Then we can communicate how much time goes into craziness.

JC – In this case, I’d create a ticket in new issues, and tell LW, and have her move it and post in the zenhub channel.

MT – I’m up to try the “alert/urgent” column. Not a perfect idea but it will be a starting point for iteration. Will let us use the current system in place, and highlight blockingness/corral stakeholders.

JM – The review column series could be done without. Not sure adding more columns is a solution, since we’re already not checking many.

JW – I’m in favor of simplifying review columns

LW – I do think we need a better notification system for urgent fires. And they could go before all other updates in standup.