ERM Sprint 63 Retrospective

Owned by Jag Goraya
Last updated: Sep 24, 2021
3 min read
Date

 

Sprint Report

https://folio-org.atlassian.net/secure/RapidBoard.jspa?rapidView=89&view=reporting&chart=sprintRetrospective&sprint=214

Sprint LogERM Sprint 63
Sprint FocusIntegration with Organizations

Agenda

  1. Review Retro Board (10 mins)
  2. Voting (2 mins)
  3. Discussion (15 mins)
  4. Summary Actions (3 mins)


Participants


Apologies 

Retrospective


Personal highlights

  • More comfortable with project structure and processes
  • Happy with the rhythm currently present in the project sprints
    • Nice to see this is being felt outside of development, in the  feature / story preparation stages
  • Better understanding of Grails and the project technologies, although at the expense of the first iteration taking longer.
  • Code reuse between the 2 UI modules.
  • Had time to pick up smaller tasks

What went well

  • Feedback loop from testing to bugs being raised
  • Transition form internal orgs to mod-organization-storage went fairly smoothly
  • The management of the dev process seemed to be smoother.

What caused problems

  • This project is often at bleeding-edge, and that can cause confusion as to where to find code or process that might be similar to what we want to achieve, to allow for reuse
    • We're doing Phase 3 planning at the moment, including looking at potential (future) module dependencies
    • We intend to flag these dependencies to other teams as soon as we have completed assessing the technical approach we intend to take
    • The Washington meeting (June 2019) is an opportunity to negotiate scheduling early development of potential dependencies
    • Improvements to release management for Stripes/UI modules may help mitigate a bit of the bleeding edge pain during delivery cycles
    • We're also looking at how to accommodate system analysis as part of the onboarding / knowledge share process
  • Testing can be problematic when we rely on 3rd party plugins, eg, Find Org
  • Onboarding time and learning curve for Grails and related techs we use are often high at the beginning of a developers involvement.
  • JIRA is often not updated inline with the projects processes.
    • See discussion notes below


Discussion Notes

JIRA is often not updated inline with the projects processes

  • The goal here is to 
    • have accurate current status of progress and obstacles
    • reduce friction of Jira admin for all team members (including developers, testers, PO and scrum master)
  • Leaving assignee unchanged helps make it easier to track work that has been 'owned' by a particular person
  • This doesn't help identify who has responsibility for an item right now, although a combination of other fields may help
    • Tester Assignee field could be used to identify who is responsible for QA
    • Status of In Code Review should mean it's FAO Component Lead 
    • Status of In QA  should mean it's FAO Tester Assignee 
    • Status of For Review  should mean it's FAO Product Owner (the Jira Project Lead )
    • Status of For Release  should mean it's FAO Lead Dev
  • If a PR hasn't passed code review, the Jira issue status is not changed back to Open  or In Progress  - the re-work is managed through Github to-and-fro
  • Automating Jira transitions from Gtihub PR status could be done, if the integration has been set up.
    • Needs some verification
    • Automation will only be effective if only one PR is raised against each issue: exceptions would have to be manually handled
  • Backlog / Kanban board filters in Jira have been set up to make it easier for leads and testers to identify items that need action based on status, rather than Assignee
    • Checking these should be part of daily routine

Still to consider: 

  • Inferring current state of progress based on Jira status still relies on developers picking up and (self-)assigning issues
  • Initial issue assignment could be handled in Sprint Planning. 
    • We do currently indicate who might pick up a piece of work in Sprint Planning log, but this isn't always reflected in Jira
    • Some items will inevitably be left in the backlog or arise during the sprint
  • A story will often have front-end and back-end work. 
    • These can (and should) be distinguished by separate subtasks 
    • Subtasks can be separately assigned
    • Separate PRs can be raised against each subtask to support automated Jira transition
  • But then, who should the story be assigned to? The PO?

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