retro-oct-6-2017.txt

What Went Well?
===============

- Defined enough stories, did not suffer from story starvation
  - Mix of uTu stories and uTu tasks
- uTu meetings have pleasingly moved to concrete tasks, rather than broad understanding
- Productive technical discussions w.r.t. implementation choices
- Guidance from outside team (Terry)
- More than average pairing
  - Pairing sessions were short+productive
- Contributed to major open-source repo (Capistrano) ...hooray David!
- More Ben time
- Teamwork (Garett noticed John's test failure, fixed)
- We're fixing the 💩
- Garett kept the retro on track when John talked about Star Trek
- John didn't cry when asked to work on Talkbox (he volunteered)

What Didn't Go As Well?
=======================

- Infrastructure struggles
  - John used wrong VPN client, had problems accessing S3 (John should have seen this to be fair)
  - Partner1 was down and needed fixing; had been down since last month, can we be more proactive?
- An ongoing question remains: 
  - Do devs need more control over demo environments?
  - OR, do the demo environments simply need to work better?
- When a story falls behind...
  - "Life stuff" happens but let's recognize it
  - More pairing?
  - More pairing! (this makes a story ready to hand off)
  - Let's catch at standup
  - Step up when a team member is falling behind (Garett and David did so this time!)
- Deploy times have skyrocketed (worse than ever)
  - We agree that a dedicated team is needed
  - The root (technical) reason is components
    - Each component has many (JS, CSS, files)
    - This makes deploy cleanup task really slow

Also Discussed
==============

- How are Create efforts progressing?
  - Q: Migration overhaul? A: Shelved?
  - Q: NCT split? A: Nova handling?
 
Happiness Scores
================

David
  - Role: 4.8  
  - Company: 4.8
  - Department: (inherits from company)
  - America: 2.5
  
Garett
  - Role: 4.7 (score up! uTu starting to role!) (would be nice for Blue Ocean to be fixed, or for us to not care)
  - Company: 4.7 
  - Department: 4.7
  
John 
  - Role: 4.5  
  - Company: 5.0
  - Department: 4.0 (engineer-hours dedicated to developer productivity / Nitro optimization please)