On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 3:02 PM, Kevin Smith <ksmith@wikimedia.org> wrote:

Here is a starting point for discussion about what team meetings we should have, moving forward. I'm not stuck on any of these specifics. It's just easier to have a candidate proposal to pick apart, rather than starting a group discussion completely from scratch. I have probably missed some as well.

So feel free to question or challenge, or to propose tweaks to or deletions of, any of these. Or propose more meetings. We might end up with a panel of meetings completely different from what you are about to read. But here goes...

1. Full-team checkin (weekly, 25-50 minutes)

This is very similar to the meeting we have been having Mondays and Thursdays, but with less of a "here is my status" focus, and more of a "here is what other people might find interesting". The Scrum-of-scrums stuff probably wouldn't be here, and definitely no looking at workboards. The primary purposes are team-building and information-spreading.

This seems like the showcase meetings.

I think the only reason to keep this around is to make sure we feel like a team. Its nice to hear everyone's voice but why not rely on the others for this?

2. "Sprint" planning (weekly, 25-50 minutes)

Since we won't be using timeboxed sprints, the frequency of this meeting is pretty arbitrary. The main goal is to make sure the "To do" columns in the sprint boards never go empty. This is where Dan (and Moiz) would propose stories to move from the product backlog into the individual sprint boards. Some combination of tech leads would attend, and would give rough estimates, raise issues about incomplete specs, suggest alternate prioritizations, etc. Other developers could be included, but most likely would be optional (and perhaps very optional). It's not clear to me to what degree this meeting should (or could) be divided up into segments for each sub-team.

This one is fine. It should start as 50 minutes I think and we should try to shrink it if possible.

Note that two 50 minute meetings back to back is 300% better than three 25 minute meetings scattered throughout the day.

3. Daily standup (almost-daily, 5-15 minutes)

I think it is useful for the subteams to have some form of meeting more than twice per week. But to avoid having "too many" meetings, I'll propose the option of doing these on IRC. I would also propose that each sub-team schedule its own separate daily standup, but obviously not at overlapping times. I'm totally open to individual subteams deciding they don't need daily standups.

These should probably follow standard daily scrum format, unless there is a reason not to: Each developer (or other information worker) would say what they completed since the last standup, what they expect to accomplish by the next one, and if they are blocked by anything. The main benefits of this are team cohesion, daily focus on what is important, and quickly identifying blockers.

Daily is probably going to be hard for some teams unless we have some asynchronous process. France and SF just don't overlap enough to do something synchronous daily.

4. Showcase (biweekly?, 25-50 minutes)

This is a chance for subteams to proudly demonstrate what they have accomplished. This could be opened up to folks outside S&D, but those details should be worked out. Especially in the near term, I'm not sure what frequency would be best. The purpose is twofold: It's always fun to show what you have done, and it's helpful to other stakeholders to really see what S&D is up to.

Tomasz's proposal to do them monthly made more sense to me.

5. Retrospective (biweekly?, 25-50 minutes)

As we settle in, these retrospectives are likely to become shorter, and we will be able to go deeper on a smaller number of issues, and really discuss possible solutions. These could be every 3 weeks or monthly, but I would prefer to have them more often, but shorter. The purpose, of course, is continual improvement.

Same comment as #4. Can we just line up the showcase and the retrospective on the same day one after the other?

6. Technical deep-dives (purely as needed)

I haven't seen a case for holding a standing meeting time open for these, especially now that the team has 5 different but sometimes-overlapping subteams.

+1. We haven't needed this for a while.

7. Product backlog grooming (TBD)

Note that this is purely at the product backlog level, not at the sprint board level. It is not clear to me who would be involved helping Dan keep the many product backlog items clearly organized.

Its not clear to me how this is different than the "sprint" planning meeting. I expect we're just going to be pulling stuff form the top of some list into the sprint when we need it.

8. Front-end/back-end coordination (TBD)

I feel like some combination of Moiz/Dan/TechLead would be helpful here, but don't yet have a clear picture of what it would be.

Ad hoc like the technical deep dives?

9. Other

Of course, there would also be various strategy-level and operational meetings between various combinations of Wes, Moiz, Dan, and Oliver. I'm especially unclear on what (if any) research/data-related standing cross-sub-team meetings we should have. And this doesn't count all the recurring one-on-ones, which are also valuable.

The showcase is a good time for that.

Its probably worth mentioning that those Monday/Thursday meetings used to be our standup. When it was just WDQ or just WDQ and Cirrus they worked just like a standup with a post-scrum time pre-booked. The twice a week frequency is what worked for Stas, James, Jan, and I for WDQ and we just stuffed everyone else in the meeting when the search vertical started because it was already there. In fact the round the room style of updates we do is literally what the standup should be, only it takes us 20 minutes instead of 15.

My proposal is to drop the full team meeting, make the standups per-subteam, and let the subteams decide how frequently and how they want them. My guess is Yuri and Max talk enough as is and won't need it. Cirrus and WDQ can go back to Mon/Thr but drop the meeting to 15 minutes instead of an hour. And when the team grows we can change that too. Make the retrospectives and showcases abut one another and only once per month. The snag with this proposal is that we no longer have "team" time every week - we only all get together two hours a month. Maybe add another hour half way between the retrospectives and call that the full team meeting.

Nik