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Arnaud Bailly edited this page Jul 15, 2021 · 3 revisions

Team Retrospectives

2021-07-15

See Miro board for original material. Some more notes below from discussion about each issue.

  • 😄 / 😦 No Jira:
    • Not feeling confident with making promises, not confident with planning aspects
    • lots of gut feeling for estimates
    • Jira is not synonym of structure, we do have a structure => there's a way to get the good things (projections) w/o the bad things (overweight)
    • Miro does not try to promise certainty/exactness
    • => have a way to give estimates?
  • 😄 Sebastian's Leadership
    • Doing great
  • 😄 Testing: Discussed a lot about it and bit of a friction but feel confident we are on the same page
    • Keep pressing on not only doing unit tests, helps a lot fleshing the implementation
    • Testing gives confidence in the long run, saves time. Everyone is convinced we should do it.
  • 😄 Good communication w/in the team
    • disagreement does not lead to resentment
    • missing it when someone is not there, feeling less energy with one less people
    • pairing/ensemble programming feels more productive with 2 people?
    • ensemble with 3 adds more insights, content, feels less efficient but more effective
  • 😄 Pairing/mobbing:
    • => obey the timer more strictly
    • => decrease the length of cycles
    • sometimes doing and erasing later it is faster than discussing
  • 😦 source dependency management is a pain
    • diamond dependencies with conflicts through various pieces of the code
    • nix does not help there -> additional roadblock in our setting
    • use of haskell.nix is clunky?
    • have a trimmed down nix-shell which only builds system dependencies and use plain cabal to build all haskell deps
    • options seem to be: keep the nix stuff and train ourselves or switch entirely another tool?
    • haskell.nix does not really work with stack because no one is using it
    • => spend some time next week deciding how to move forward
  • 😄 Miro:
    • everything is in the right place
  • 😄 No Project manager
    • we are still doing project management
    • there is not a team depending on us, we depend on other teams, synchronizing happens "informally" in the engineering meeting or through conversations with people
    • Arbitrary Bureaucratic PM Work -> just filling out forms, just more work
    • project managers are mostly doing reporting anyway
  • 😄 Demo:
    • no glitch, very confident to add something and play with it live
  • 😕 Tail research:
    • good to be involved but very unbounded work, could drift off
    • things are not clear on the amount of work needed
    • how to manage expectations in a better way? we are doing dev and also helping research
    • => kanban with dedicated 1/6th slot for research work
  • 😦 No users yet:
    • have something out that people could start using or give us feedback on
    • => build more documentation!
  • 😕 Plutus:
    • feels somewhat overwhelming yet feel better than a month ago
    • slow, hard to get feedback, errors are hard to decrypt
    • => keep isolating plutus specific code
  • 😄 property tests:
    • use it more often, even where there's a single test
    • we sometimes have tests about some transaction => transform into PBT

2021-04-15

We do a talking-stick style retrospective where everyone talks uninterrupted then hand-over the (virtual) talking stick to their "neighbour" until everyone passes.

  • AB: appreciate the debates and the ways we are doing thing, eager to start something
  • SN: doing things on the side is good, appreciate it. Sometimes struggling a bit with discussions, not talking about the same thing, different context
    • Like we do this discussions, have a better result in the end, discussions further what we have and we do
    • Getting our hands on something, get back coding and show something, have a walking skeleton to support discussion but discussions were needed
    • We know stuff, we can ignore what we know and revisit all of this once we have a prototype
  • MB:
    • Getting started to do something
    • Many discussions these past days, there are tradeoffs, not much participation and it was deliberate, "want to go with the flow"
    • Past 3 years arguing on what to do and how to do, we can try ideas and check there are goods, we'll have plenty of time to rewrite code
    • We need someone to take the decision?
    • We have done many small things, we struggle to find agreements on some things though
    • Happy with Plutus stuff, not because of plutus, having a goal and be able to do something, feeling of accomplishment
  • AB:
    • debating without concrete objectives / arguments (bikeshedding designs?) is something we should try to avoid
    • need structure, avoid the "tyranny of structureless"
    • don't want to do PRs and Code reviews
  • SN
  • MB:
    • having one person do all things is fraught with perils
    • not only about trust
    • getting used to PP, better this week and last week thanks to being able to focus on Hydra <= having a single day on wallet
    • drawings are very concrete, but we have many (too many?) of them, need a way to make decision to have a "first version" of drawing
  • SN:
    • great that Matthias can focus more, important to have MB around
    • schedule is vague, objectives are fuzzy, we should come together to have more specific objectives
    • reflecting on milestone objectives: making sure we have an architecture for the product
    • 2nd objective: scope, finding a sweetspot between constraints and requirements, limitations
    • 3rd goal: prototype, getting closer to that goal, but it's only a prototype not set in stone, there are other ways
    • bikeshedding is not an issue if you have a time clock running!
    • open, but wouldn't mind with a traditional workflow
  • AB:
    • tried mob and it worked
    • about taking decisions: we should have a project charter in which we define our decision process
  • MB:
    • want to avoid bikeshedding and lengthy PRs
    • small team is good, you don't go faster adding more people
  • SN:
    • like the fact we are 3 people; but at some point we might need to hire more engineers; maybe after the prototype; what about Julian Ospald?
    • risk/story-map was a good decision, get the landscape mapped, find "skeletons buried"
    • when do we need structure? having a backlog which is guiding the effort pursued as an ensemble
    • right now it does feel too adhoc, mixing uneasiness with relating PRs with US -> help have a better sleep
    • "how can we get Matthias get a better sleep?"
    • how do we feel about having Jira and use that for a prioritized backlog of our work?
  • AB:
    • I appreciate on that team
    • backlog is totally fine
    • it's good and important to set goals for ensemble sessions, even for each keyboard-passing-round
  • MB:
    • make something out of the team
    • how do we measure progress -> Team Charter
      • right now, by the number of "Green stickies" on the roadmap
      • define a way to define progress? milestones, goals, how capable is our Hydra system
  • SN:
    • good question about progress, will change across phases
    • progress would mean we have a demo -> nobody cares about protocol/network, we need something that can give an idea of what the product can be
    • really likes to be here
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