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Release 1.14 Retrospective

Release 1.14 Retrospective

Apr 10, 2019

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Date

Apr 3, 2019

Team

 

Participants

@Asha Vade 

Background

Release 1.14 Retrospective. 

The topic for this retrospective is - Planning/Estimation and effective usage of JIRA as a tool to enable.

Appreciations and Acknowledgements

  • Collective effort across Dev, Testing teams working towards and bringing in release on time

  • Focus on writing unit cases within teams has improved

  • Portal team (Anoop) has worked on optimising the load time of portal page post Harish moving to Offline Consumption team

  • Work related to stability of the product/NFR has been recognised, posing solution challenge to the team 

  • Team members (Analytics Team) discussing across other team for dependent tasks

  • P1 on weekend related to Portal (Srini and Anoop) worked on this to resolve immediately

  • Irrespective on # of defects raised, teams held up and kept at it to resolve

  • Developers providing solution on Jira proactively

  • UX revamp has helped in simplifying the workflow messaging

  • CBSE demo - Harish Mahesh and Rayulu - Thanking for helping out (Krishna)

  • Teams opened up for 3 sprints release

  • Appreciation to Manmeet to bring in Asha and Chitranshu to follow up + 1

  • QA Team - Getting lot more calls to understand the requirements to PMs

  • Entire Engineering team for delivery ETB 2.0 which has a great consumer value

  • Content Framework, Mobile and LP - Content Streaming delivery

  • Mobile, UI, UX working together and bought in quicker results

  • RACI chart better understanding of Accountabiliy/Responsilbity

Retrospective

Start doing

Stop doing

Keep doing

Start doing

Stop doing

Keep doing

  • Team Standup meetings must start

  • Build must come on time, if not communication must be sent out in case of delay

  • Communication to QA that build has been deployed and the scope for testing has also to be mentioned 

  • Unit test coverage with in the teams 

  • Teams need to upskill to write unit test within the budgeted time

  • Simplification of Jira Work flow

  • Can action items from retrospective action items be collated for tracking ?

  • Pre-prod to PROD deployment must improve. Smoke test validations on PROD must improve

  • One channel (SPgM) for inputs to TMs for features/tech items

  • Simplify what we are implementing. Eg: Urdu related story, Add video was dropped 

  • Design discussions with DC must happen more often 

  • Teams must understand the other modules (technically) to be able to understand how the dependency is being met 

  • Jira must be used to record key decisions

  • TMs must take a call before the sprint starts if the story is ready to be taken up by the team

  • TMs, PMs, team members must understand the Jira workflow status move

  • Callouts from DC and TMs on feature to be taken up or not upfront

  • Interaction between Tech Managers and DC must happen early on

  • Analysis of initial vs actual estimates for TMs  and PMs

  • Run through the Roadmap to the tech teams early on by PMs to help understand the business need and value

  • Start calling out issues early on by dev teams

  • UX and Tech teams (DC, TMs) must collaborate more closely and often to bring out issues early on

  • Can releases go out with whatever features are ready to go ?

  • Start focusing on the outcome of the release

  • Team wise retrospective sprint wise

  • Can every week task/items that is being slipped communicated to PMs ?

  • Resource allocation in JIRA.

  • Dates related to QA planning without understanding the requirements in scope for the release

  • Work allocation tracking in Jira was stopped and moved to google sheet (CF Team)

  • Features coming in between sprints leading to scope creep and delays. Eg..?

  • Testing efforts within teams must improve. QA can test issues in pre-prod which are existing prod defects

  • Variable tracking sheet in excel for deployment is not a good practice

  • Old releases still showing Jira tickets that are not in closed status

  • Too many deployments, must combine deployments or a regular deployment cadence

  • Reduce the iterations for design reviews

  • Discussion on Jira stories must be avoided and not used as slack chat.

  • Most of the issues that came in 1.14 where production existing issues that could have been planned and fixed in time.

  • Continue unit test case writing to improve code coverage  + 1

  • Improvement to the Functional test suite for SB Platform must continue

  • Work related to stability of the product and NFR must continue + 1

  • TMs has got access to GIT repo to verify deployment variables

  • Story descriptions getting update regularly and not limited only comments by the PMs

  • Deliberate Communication to the stakeholders

  • Communication - Decision oriented and sharp also targeted towards decision making

  • SoS has helped in understanding the dependencies

  • Information of items that are being moved out a sprint /release

  • QA Team - Getting lot more calls to understand the requirements to PMs

  • Interaction between Tech Managers and DC must happen early on

Action items

-Communication to QA/stakeholders that build has been deployed and the scope for testing has also to be mentioned - @Chitranshu Keshav 

Product and TEch team communication structures - @Manmeet Singh
Jira workflow status - refresher course - @asha, @Chitranshu
Document must have categories for PM, TM, QA - @Asha Vade, @Chitranshu Keshav