Hi All,
Earlier today we had our fortnightly FxA development retrospective.
These continue to be valuable affairs packed with thought-provoking
content - indeed, one of the items in "what are we doing well" this week
was "retrospectives" :-)
Follow-ups from last time included:
* We've been successful at reducing the review burden of big global
search-and-replace PRs this train, although we'll have to be
careful they don't sneak back in.
* Our commit messages are, unfortunately, still a bit of a mess.
It's hard to untrain the muscle-memory of clicking on the big
green merge button! We're going to continue trying for readable
commit messages and using the (#<pr number>); r=reviewer convention.
And new thoughts/learnings from this week included:
* The retrospectives are going well! And we're definitely using them
as a safe space to discuss things that aren't going so well, which
is really encouraging.
* Being more explicit about breaking large PRs down into smaller chunks
has been valuable, and increased the subjective quality/thoroughness
of the reviews. Let's keep doing that.
* Regular meeting summaries are still a hit! It can be hard to feel
like you're adding value when you're just sending out a summary of
what's in the video and/or etherpad, but the emails really do provide
value.
* Setting up a new CI box is fraught with danger and gotchas.
* Firefox 40 runs our unit tests a full 20s faster than Firefox 48
and above, for reasons we don't understand.
In terms of things to look at improving, we had two chunky ones which
we'll follow up on next week:
* We've got a lot of meetings. Can we optimize some away, or
perhaps reduce the list of attendees? We agreed to continue
this discussion offline.
* There's been a lot of "train creep" recently - delaying the cutting
of a train in order to land a last few PRs. This runs the risk of
derailing our release schedule, and gives us less headroom to respond
to any bustage discovered at deploy time. We agreed to check on this
explicitly when cutting train-73 and discuss it more after that.
And there was also a list of smaller items that we could improve on:
* New contributors continue to struggle with our dependencies, and our
strict commit-message format. We can help this by:
* Pulling the dependency-installer logic out of fxa-local-dev to share
* Documenting commit-message expectations in each repo
* Some of the content-server unit tests are not very unit-test-y, with
some modules only covered thanks to tests in other related modules.
* The documentation for flow events continues to evolve, and we will
need to continue investing in it as they become more important to
our metric story.
Finally, one last follow-up from several meetings ago:
* The fxa_watercooler vidyo room was a bust, a synchronous chatting
space is just not a good fit for how this highly-distributed team
works in practice. We're going to get rid of it.
Cheers,
Ryan
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