2020-04-30 Sprint Transition

Owned by Ben Leibert
May 04, 2020
2 min read

Date

Apr 30, 2020

Participants & Internal Stakeholders

  • @Felimone Amone Junior

  • @Chongsun Ahn (Unlicensed)

  • @Christine Lenihan

  • @Ben Leibert

  • @Sebastian BrudziÅ„ski

  • @Aleksandra CiesiÅ„ska

  • @Oskar Hinc (Unlicensed)

  • @Joanna Bebak (Deactivated)

Showcase

Project Retrospective

What Went Well

  • The team achieved a lot both this sprint and over the course of the project. Very generally:

    • @Mateusz Kwiatkowski accomplished a tremendous amount throughout his time on the project.

    • @Aleksandra CiesiÅ„ska did a great job of balancing the needs of both SELV and SIGLOFA (OpenLMIS-Angola).

    • @Oskar Hinc (Unlicensed) ramped-up on the project far faster than I imagined, and accomplished quite a lot in just a short amount of time.

    • @Joanna Bebak (Deactivated) was a first-class and extremely valuable member of the team. Her attention to detail made the software much better than it otherwise would have been.

  • The team’s priorities were consistently clear.

  • Most of the tickets were clear, though some needed elaboration.

  • The team dynamics were great. Communication was good, and @Mateusz Kwiatkowski continued to offer guidance even after moving to another project.

  • The daily standup meetings were really helpful.

    • Because they’re rather early in Seattle’s time zone, @Ben Leibert particularly appreciated that folks would broadcast in advance whenever they couldn’t attend a standup.

  • Both with regard to data-pumps and the 3.9 release, collaboration with and support from the Core team was great.

  • The weekly sprint cadence felt good.

  • Although it was tough to loose @Mateusz Kwiatkowski so close to the project’s end, it was nice for Soldevelo to have allowed him to remain on the project for as long as he did. Soldevelo was as flexible as possible when we extended the project’s timeline with little warning.

Areas for Improvement

  • Although most of the tickets were clear, some needed elaboration. Similarly, although we took the time to document new development and configuration by project’s end, the efforts were occasionally retroactive. Tickets should explicitly highlight where such effort is necessary.

  • The project’s extensions, followed by last minute uncertainty about whether its budget would necessitate an early conclusion, where partially symptomatic of somewhat ad hoc budget management and planning. It may have helped to:

    • Be more in tune with our overall budget and spending.

    • More consistently create and estimate tickets in advance. (Such backlog grooming would have also better positioned us for the project’s next phase.)

  • Budgeting more time for exploratory testing may have been wise. Although the Core team’s efforts should catch most issues, exploratory testing may have helped us more quickly catch:

    • The fact that SELV’s production server couldn’t be restarted without data/configuration loss.

    • Timeouts recently incurred while attempting to upload CSV configuration within the SIGLOFA project.

  • Because tickets would occasionally bounce between QA and In Progress more than expected, it sometimes seemed as though we relied on Joanna a bit too much. Developers are uniquely positioned to QA their work because they’re equipped with firsthand knowledge about what they’ve changed and thus most likely broken. Sometimes it would have thus been okay for developers to take more time to QA their own work.

    Overall, the Soledevelo team performed very well and accomplished quite a lot.

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