13.3 Team Retrospectives
Retrospective Summary and Discussion
- Retrospective Document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nEkM_7Dj4bT21GJy0Ut3By76FZqCfLBmFQNVThmW2TY/edit#
- Team Retrospective Issue (13.3): #8876 (closed)
- Retrospective Summary Video (13.3): https://youtu.be/nH9EjsVJ-us
- Retrospective Summary Slide Deck: Link
- Retrospective Discussion Video (13.3): https://youtu.be/-vcJdXT5jlw
Discussion Topics:
- Given the global events in the US, Belarus, and elsewhere that added to the existing levels of stress and anxiety over the pandemic, what can we do to keep team members in good shape meanwhile keep day-to-day work efficient?
- How do your groups use the various infrastructure monitoring dashboards/tools that are available? Now that we are using feature flags more rigorously, it opens the door for engineers to monitor their own changes in production. My group is working on adding a process around monitoring changes after a feature flag is enabled. Is there an existing process/mandate for this, besides the feature flag rollout template?
Please vote for upto 2 topics and add your answers to the discussion document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nEkM_7Dj4bT21GJy0Ut3By76FZqCfLBmFQNVThmW2TY/edit#
Note: Only top 2 voted topics will be discussed in the retro meeting, however async discussion can carry on for other topics.
New format
Based on feedback from the 13.2 retrospective, in 13.3, we continue the experiment by adopting a few suggestions.
- Make cut off date for completing your Team Retrospectives and adding your learnings to the retro doc back by three days from
M, 30th/31st
toM+1, 3rd
. - Discussion topics are now added to the retro doc by
M+1, 4th
which will allow for two days of async discussions and voting.
Here's what the new format will look like:
- We'll be breaking the retrospective into two parts: Summary and Discussion.
- Summary: The summary will be a short video pre-recorded by the meeting host covering what went well / what went wrong / what can be improved. All teams will fill out the retrospective issue and doc as normal along with parts they'd like to highlight. A couple of days before the retrospective meeting, the meeting host will pre-record a presentation of all the highlights. This presentation video will be sent out before the retrospective meeting.
-
Discussion: The discussion will be a 25 minute meeting which we aim to make more interactive. We'll be focusing on action items (improvement tasks) and discussion topics. For each retrospective, the meeting host will choose two discussion topics for the group to discuss. These topics are likely to stem from the retrospective summary and the host will try to choose topics that the majority of the group will find useful. The agenda of the meeting will be:
- Previous retrospective improvement tasks (5 minutes)
- Discussion topics (14 minutes, 2 topics at 7 minutes each)
- Improvements to track for next release (5 minutes)
- Wrap up (1 minute)
Timeline
- 24th: Meeting host opens the development retrospective issue.
- 24th - 3rd (M+1): Engineering Managers complete the retrospective issue and add their notes and highlights to the Retrospective Summary section and Improvement Task sections in the retrospective document
- 3rd (M+1): Meeting host closes the development retrospective issue.
- 4th: Meeting host records a short video presentation of the Retrospective Summary. The meeting host announces the video in #whats-happening-at-gitlab slack channel including the retrospective discussion topics.
- 8th: Retrospective Discussion meeting is held.
Steps for engineering managers on each team to do before the engineering-wide retrospective
- Please have a retrospective with your team following the guidelines outlined in the handbook.
- After the retrospective is complete, please choose a subset some of your most interesting learnings to share company-wide in the retro doc. Please try to group by topic rather than by team, as suggested in #3416 (closed).
- In this document, if the item would be of interest to a number of teams in engineering, please indicate that it should be highlighted by adding the text highlight at the beginning of the text. The meeting host will highlight this item when they create the pre-recorded retrospective summary presentation video.
- For items which have didn't go well, create an issue to address. In the case where a manager feels an issue can/should not be created, please include that in the what went wrong section.
- If there are action items in the document for your team from the previous retrospective please provide an update on them in the document. They will be verbalized during the meeting.
- Add a checkbox in the table below when your retrospective is done and when the document is updated.
Please do all of these steps at least one day before the engineering-wide retrospective.
Steps for engineering managers during the engineering-wide discussion retrospective Zoom session
- Read through the discussion topics in the retro doc and add any input. The discussion topics will be announced once the pre-recorded retrospective summary video is sent out.
- Be prepared to verbalize any improvement tasks for your team or discussion input. Note that the meeting organizer may add additional items to verbalize, so please review the document in advance of the meeting for any additions for your team.
- If you can't make the meeting and there is an item for you to verbalize, please ask someone else on your team to attend to do so.
cc: @fseifoddini @kencjohnston @jyavorska @david @ebrinkman @joshlambert @hilaqu
Edited by Chun Du