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