GitLab Team Retrospectives, 6 Aug 2020

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From YouTube: 13.2 Team Retrospective Summary

Description

Please join us for the Retrospective Discussion on Thursday August 6th, 2020 at 4PM UTC (9AM PT)

13.2 Team Retrospective Issue:
https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/-/issues/8418

Retrospective Document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nEkM_7Dj4bT21GJy0Ut3By76FZqCfLBmFQNVThmW2TY/edit#

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Hey everyone welcome to the 13.2 team. Retrospective summary, I'm jerome and I'll be the host for this video. uh What we're going to be covering today are three things. First, going over what went well, second, what went wrong and third, what can we improve? So, let's talk about what went well, this milestone, starting with collaboration.

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We've got a lot of different teams, reporting that collaboration went well. What I want to do is take a few of these and highlight them. So, let's take a look at jake from plan, we had a very successful cross-team collaboration with ecosystem for the jira integration, expansion, mvc thanks to solid communication and collaboration, we're able to deliver more than we expected for the 13.2 release.

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Next, we have nicole from release management thanks to great collaboration within the team, as well as cross-team collaboration with the runner group. We were able to successfully deliver a feature that had turned out to be more complex than initially expected.

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Let's take a look at results, we also have a lot of teams reporting some great results here. Let's highlight a few of them cz from global search. We have completed the full indexing of all paid customers on gitlab.com and have made significant performance improvements in this release.

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We've got john from package saying uh we can now measure adoption of each package manager, format in our dashboard and roman, from create knowledge, saying we release to figma plugin, so designs can be uploaded to issues right from within figma and then michelle from create source code has a lot of awesome and often complex issues were shipped sectional code owners moving approvals to core finding references with code, navigation file by file reviewing and squash commits, as well as an item potency issue that has been taking a while to get out.

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Let's take a look at efficiency, clement reports, sorry clement from monitor apm reports. We had a technical spike and design issue take place in the same milestone for the same topic. This was very efficient and helped to make sure the designs were actionable and ready for engineering in the next milestone, and then we've got jake from plan.

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In order to deliver the jira mvc in 13.2, we were under a really tight timeline to help keep things moving. We identified dedicated maintainers so that smaller, mrs could make it through the review cycle quickly to keep the team unblocked.

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um Let's uh now take a look at what went wrong.

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Starting with collaboration, roman from create knowledge, we moved design management from a issue tab into the issue, main view which ended up creating a lot of discussions. As there was very little alignment between stages and teams.

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Taking a look at efficiency, this one's actually mine for the growth conversion team, the requirements of our storage project change multiple times, resulting in extra work and increased confusion for engineering, ux and product. We think having a clear dri up front is crucial for cross-functional projects and then andre from create source code.

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This milestone the timeline for the release post, mrs and the release being cut were hard to reconcile release post mrs needed to go in by the 17th well, mrs being merged on the 17th, could still make it into production on time to be released to customers on the 22nd.

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This leads to scenarios where, if we follow the process, the process being only merging the release post, mrs after it reaches production on time, docs are being shipped with incorrect information and the release post doesn't mention things we actually shipped.

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All right, let's talk about how we can improve so under iteration clement from monitor apm, says we're still working on improving collaboration with our sct in quad planning, sct being software engineering test, it was highlighted that we should use the quad planning label for issues that are planned for the upcoming milestones.

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Let's take a look at efficiency: we've got craig from database, saying, stop starting and start stopping, see things through to completion and avoid having too many issues open in parallel. I think that's definitely one which we can all relate to.

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And then, let's take a look at iteration jake from plan. We want to push engineers to be more involved in breaking down and defining issues to help clarify expectations. Earlier in 13.2, we had a lot of large items with lots of unknowns that we didn't really discover until deep into the milestone.

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So breaking things down earlier and having a clearer understanding of scope would help manage expectations and set more realistic goals.

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So that's everything that we have for our retrospective summary. I want to invite everyone to join us for the retrospective discussion, which we're going to be having the retrospective discussion is going to take place on thursday august 6th at 4, 4pm, utc or 9am pacific.

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You can join via our youtube, gitlab channel or via an internal zoom lake. If you are an internal team member, there's going to be a couple of topics which we're discussing the first topic is: what are your biggest challenges when it comes to cross-team collaboration?

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You can think of cross-team, as within your front-end and back-end teams, or even across different groups or stages. I noticed that a lot of teams mentioned that collaboration went well I'd, love for those teams to be able to share what sort of things they're doing to ensure that crosstalk collaboration goes well.

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The second topic that I'd love to discuss is have you noticed whether your team is working more and more synchronously?

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This is something that I've noticed from within my teams and I'm curious if other teams are seeing this as well, and if you are noticing that your teams are working more synchronously, what are the best actions we can take to ensure that we are working more async.

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So those are the two topics which we're going to be discussing. I hope to see everyone there on thursday august 6th thanks for joining today,.