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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

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 ?

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

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