tl;dr: Sprint 41 (29th September - 12th October) for Mobile Apps will be unstructured time for engineers to work on whatever they like.
Sprint 41 is coming up. During that sprint, the Mobile Team is having its quarterly planning sessions. These planning sessions involve all remote staff travelling to the WMF office, and participating for two full days in those sessions. Staff also take this time to meet other staff in the office and network. Realistically, much less structured work gets done during this time than in normal sprints.
Both the iOS and Android apps engineering teams have decided to take sprint 41 to be unstructured time. No cards or stories will be scheduled for this sprint. Engineers will be free to work on whatever they want. It's a great opportunity to fix bugs, dabble in projects other than apps, or work on features, such as the Nearby feature which came out of recent unstructured time.
Additionally, sprint 41 also so happens to fall in the time period where the SUL finalisation feature development should be wrapping up. Given my commitments to that product as its product owner, it would be good for me to be able to take a little bit of time away from the apps and pour over those features in detail. So I will likely be using the unstructured time for that, as well as starting implementation of the evil master plans we generate in our quarterly planning. :-)
Thanks,
Dan
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Dan Garry
Associate Product Manager, Mobile Apps
Wikimedia Foundation