Lean Coffee Topics

1. Devs advocating for tech opportunities in backlog ++++++
2. Unlocking Cross-Squad collaboration  ++++++
3. Unlocking collaboration +++++
4. Where to put a feature?  App/Library/IDA/etc?  ++
5. Localizing on frontend or backend? +++++
6. Repo ownership +++
7. Awesomizing Courseware

Notes

• Devs advocating for tech opportunities in backlog
  • "Tech opportunities":
    • Necessary stuff (e.g., upgrades) and proactive stuff (future-proofing)
  • Development Culture and Empowerment
    • Are developers advocating for these to their product teams?
      • We do have some positive examples (e.g., Journals removal)
      • Might be harder for work that is cross-team dependent.
    • Ideas:
      • Asking for some percentage work in each sprint
      • Can we just have a consistent amount of maintenance work alotted instead of needing to justify each individual work?
      • "Scheduling dental surgery versus brushing teeth every day"
  • Infrastructure
    • There has been some infrastructural support to make-upgrades easier/automated.
  • Communication
    • Communicating the "business risk"
    • Providing numbers and metrics would help
      • But computing those is a time sink
• Unlocking Cross-Squad collaboration
  • "Squad" = the team that you work with every day
  • Problems
    • I don't know what's the priority of the other teams
      • not just what they did, but what's on their roadmap
    • Teams have already packed up their work for the quarter
      • little room for injections
    • How do I know what others are working on and who I should talk to about X
      • relying on Git commit history
    • Not a consistent way of tracking projects/tickets
  • Ideas
    • DevOps has 4 hours every Monday for "Quality of Life" time
      • now replaced with 5% time
    • Office Hours - can queue up non-pressing items
      • DevOps has a few processes to allow for interrupts
      • But some of them are not well attended
      • 10th floor is not a great location
    • S&E has added "component areas" to Jira that we can use
    • Monthly Arch Standup - scrum of scrums
      • enhancements:
        • focus on what's coming much more than what was done
          • Write down what was done
          • When speaking out loud, focus on upcoming
        • communicate out to #dev channel after the meeting
      • send a reminder to all of the engineers beforehand
      • time-box each team's update
    • Explicitly communicate in 3 channels (slack/email/all-hands) before embarking on an Epic

Retro

• Overall liked the structure of this meeting
• Time limits were good
• Timer ring should be shorter
• +1 on raising hands
• Not all needed people are in the room, but a good chance to brainstorm
• In the past, we have gotten a chance to dive deep on an individual's problem
• More than a meeting, not a lunch
• I liked raising the hand as a way to vote