2018-12-13 Retrospective - Community Portals
Date | Dec 13, 2018 |
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Participants | @Meredith Slota (Unlicensed) @Michael Lee (Unlicensed) @Michael Barakat (Unlicensed) @Anna Greenwood (Unlicensed) @Jay Hodgson @Sara Gosline (Unlicensed) @Robert Allaway @Ljubomir Bradic (Unlicensed) |
Background
The "community portal" product team is a cross-functional group with members from the platform and scientific teams. After working on two portal prototypes for two months, and shipping versions of both live, it seems useful to check in and examine our working practices and see where we need to make tweaks moving forward.
Retrospective
Whiteboard photos at the bottom; below are transcribed notes, followed by a grouping into start / stop / continue + relevant Jira tickets as action items.
What Worked
Launched! On time! Deadlines met!
Issues were filed (Jira)
Issue clarity was ok
Flexibility - chance coure, iterative
Cautious with feature creep despite speed
Realistic deadlines / deliverables / scope
Kept the customer in mind
group_concat shipped
ANONYMOUS ACCESS TO DATA
Priorities:
Everyone had a voice, was a leader
Good listening
Good communication, triage
Good discussions
No overreach in scope
"Not under the gun"
Clear ownership / shared responsibility
Clarified was "next level" CMS might be: wikis > structured content > schemas
Dogfood worked! Using "explore" to find errors in data
What Could Be Better
Jira workflows - validation / closed
Comments used for status
Confusion over "shipping"
What is "done"?
What are "versions"? - dates for v1, v2 NF are unclear
NO ROADMAP BY SPRINT
design vs. dev happening / overlapping
Gantt chart for project?
difficult to estimate LOE + dev time
NO TIME FOR FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
what even is a data portal for?
tools / products not aligned to key scenarios
Difficult to cut "explore" from NF
Not owning the story
Product messaging, no communication channels externally
Partial project for AMP-AD caused confusion
Ownership between Anna / Meredith - some gaps, some overlap
Didn't walk through whole user process / main scenarios
Uncovered technical risk re: tables / download LATE
Who owns QA? unclear and confusing
BIG PICTURE IS UNCLEAR - how do portals + Synapse work?
Messaging to internal folks vs. partners
Too much power given to partners (e.g. URLs, naming)
No documentation of discussions causing churn
Design changed over time but files disorganized, out-of-date
No single source of truth about what we're building
SPF for components - risk and stressor
Want more time for testing
Artificial divide between MB + Synapse engineers
Lack of focus on stabilizing components
Not enough wiggle room in ship dates
Start doing | Stop doing | Keep doing |
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