Team Meeting Notes

Owned by Simon Chen
Last updated: Apr 03, 2023 by Feanil Patel
5 min read

October 17th, 2017

  • Simon's transition update
    • Deadline is 30th October
    • Cambridge point team will be comprised of two point persons:
      • Product
        • The product person will be rotated
        • The product lead will not make the decision for the bug/ticket priority, team needs to make that call.
        • They will not help you investigate issues, they may help by facilitating connections with relevant resources in Cambridge
        • They will help with grooming the stories and if they have sufficient context, bugs as well
      • Engineering 
        • Will be rotated between 6 engineers from Learner Cambridge
        • Once Simon's position is back-filled, Spartans will have a consistent Eng lead in Cambridge
        • They will help with grooming stories and also in figuring out engineering problems
        • Do code review
        • May participate in some of the trainings
  • Translation ownership

October 3rd, 2017

  • Invite for Newrelic training invite went out. It's on Thu Oct 12, 2017 2pm - 3pm
    • Record the training at this time for rest of the team
    • Uzair Rasheed (Deactivated) will record the session, and book a time with rest of the team for showing the training.
    • Simon Chen will also explore option to record the session.
  • People update
  • Translation Process

September 19, 2017

  • Newrelic Server alerts
    • Servers included are for ecommerce, discovery and credentials
  • Night time expectations with Spartans
    • Do whatever is comfortable and convenient for you. 
    • Try to collect all the messages next day when you are starting to work
  • PR expectations with Spartans
  • Newrelic training for spartans. Any specific topic you guys want to cover? Early October
  • Self-grooming?
  • Transifex technical ownership

Action Items

  • Spartan team to send an email to devops team, if necessary, to ask what are the common alerts we've seen before

September 5, 2017

  • Internal Stakeholder feedback review
    • How to gauge the resolution timeline for CAT-3 bugs?
      • Ticket reporters needs to have a stake in the ticket as well
    • How to differentiate the tickets within CAT-3 bugs?
      • How well do I understand the issue. What is the impact?
      • How long has the bug been out there
      • How much effort does it requires of me on the issue?
    • How do we communicate issue priority?
      • Triage ask about ticket deadline and urgency from the reporter
      • How many learners are impacted by this? Or this can potentially impact?
  • Who is triaging? Do everyone feel comfortable triage now?
    • We will experiment everyone on the team to triage
    • Avoid the tragedy of commons
  • Responsibility of the Primary on-call
  • Grooming
    • Should we do a grooming every week? Over groom?
    • Self-groom. Feel comfortable to understand the tickets in the ready for grooming column, and groom with team member
      • Some time members don't have enough knowledge, and need Simon Chen or others' help to understand the ticket.
      • Prioritization of ready for grooming column. We need to keep that column to always be prioritize.
    • Pre-groom tickets
    • Rotating grooming master?
    • We will talk about this again, and make a decision next time
  • Transition between primary on-call to secondary on-call
  • Demos

August 22, 2017

  • Jareer's role
    • Simon is doing multiple things for the team. Support, Prioritization and Mentoring
    • Jareer will take more time to focus on people management, career growth and mentoring
  • Simon 1 on 1 with the team
    • Cancel the bi-weekly 1 on 1 sessions with Simon
    • Can have 1 on 1 with him on a per need basis
  • Git Best Practices
  • Team's mini projects
    • edX Footer
    • Single Support Form -  LEARNER-2296 - Getting issue details... STATUS
    • Deactivate and delete a user
      • Discovery task at  LEARNER-2169 - Getting issue details... STATUS
  • Idea page for Learner:

August 08, 2017

  • Now that everyone had a taste of both Triage and Sustaining, what do you guys think?
    • Everyone agrees with current configuration of triage and sustaining.
    • On-call rotation plan is still a go.
    • It is up to the resource but it would be preferable if WIP can be transitioned to another team member in sustaining. 
    • Everybody in the team can decide when to switch from bounded sustaining/triage roles to overlapping responsibilities, particularly they can start when they are in sustaining.
  • Team performance measurements
    • Everyone needs to think about the performance metrics and how can we improve it.
    • Simon Chen will look into improving the granularity in reporting plotting points over time instead of stories.
  • Share your take aways from the knowledge sessions
  • Transition between primary on-call to secondary on-call
  • Github best practice


July 25th, 2017

  • Kanban presentation (A continuation of Agile Refresher)
    • Simon Chen will look into JIRA Kanban reports
    • Team will start putting in 'Actual Points' when closing tickets
      • Team will use the difference between Estimated and Actual points to improve grooming
    • Goal of the meetings in Kanban is to improve our velocity
  • Git best practice with team
    • Discussion shifted to next team meeting
  • Demos
    • Discussion shifted to next team meeting
  • Standup vs status
    • Lahore team members will preferably send out a quick status report to Simon Chen every day.
    • Anyone who needs Simon help/feedback on their work will attend the 8:30AM (EST) standup with him.

July 11th, 2017

  • No notes were taken.

June 12th, 2017

  • ListenTool expectations
    • At the bare minimum, Simon need to give quarterly feedback to the team members
    • We can use the tool to be a note pad for one on one conversations
  • Hamza joining the team in July

  • GoCD pipeline process

  • Vacation and flexibility

    • Eid holiday on week of June 26th to 30th
    • Tasawer Nawaz (Deactivated) July 10th for a week
    • /wiki/spaces/LEARNER/pages/158144995
    • PTO (Paid Time Off) Same as Vacation in Lahore
    • For 1 or two days, Gives the team a 2 days notice
    • For 1 or two weeks vacations, we expect you to give team an as early as possible
    • Email the overall learner team about your vacation notice once you have that in plan
    • Email the overall learner team the day before you go on vacation as a reminder
    • For triaging squad, it maybe better to add ES-services-coordinators, ES marketing and Student Support team members
  • Publisher launch
    • Release on June 13th.
    • Waheed Ahmed (Deactivated) will be partially on Spartans for Week of June 12th
    • Help Educator Escalation on Publisher bugs. But keep in mind that publisher bugs are Educator bugs
  • Marketing site and PHP knowledge

  • Code review and who knows what

May 30th, 2017

  • 15five vs 1on1 vs ListenTool

    • Arbisoft uses ListenTool as the feedback mechanism
    • Arbisoft has been using ListenTool for the past year
    • Tasawer Nawaz (Deactivated) will ask Ayesha to give Simon's ListenTool the team members within Spartans
    • Team's desire is to abandon 15Five
    • Most of the team wants 1on1 every 2 weeks. But we should be flexible to have some member to be on 1 in 4 weeks cadence

  •  edX notes

  • Splunk alerts
    • Divide the different types alerts to team member?
    • Same team members are looking at the same alerts. So no more than 1 member is looking at alerts at the same time
    • Proposal 1: If a team member is the scheduled on-call person on Opsgenie, the other person should be scheduled to be looking at splunk alert
    • Proposal 2: For the person who is on-call on Opsgenie, the person is also responsible for splunk alert.
    • One person is on alerts (Ops-genie, Splunk) (on-call). One person is actively triaging. Rest of the team can be on Sustaining
    • We should try to discuss and execute the topic again when Jareer is back from his Annual Vacation.

  • On-call and weekend

    • Acquia email didn't get to send to Uzair
    • Acquia email not sending to Spartan team as a whole
    • Triage didn't know they need to respond to Acquia emails. The emails are ignored
    • Team didn't know about .htaccess file on edx-mktg repo, and the way we use it to block IPs
    • Action Items: 
      • Simon Chen to inform Acquia to include learner-spartan team during their communication to edX
      • Triage team to monitor Acquia emails sent to the team