Release 1.14 Retrospective

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Date
Team
ParticipantsAsha 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 doingStop doingKeep 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 structuresManmeet Singh
  • Jira workflow status - refresher course - @asha, @Chitranshu
  • Document must have categories for PM, TM, QA - Asha VadeChitranshu Keshav