2021-06-18 Retrospective Geometry Nodes #3

Participants: Dalai Felinto, Hans Goudey, Himanshi Kalra, Jacques Lucke, Simon Thommes

As part of the wrap up of this 8 week project leg, the retrospective of the last sprint addressed the entire 8 weeks.

As a recap, the goal of this period was to cover the basics for material, curves, volumes and attribute processor.

What worked well

  • Material pipeline was fully finished to completion.
  • Hans being able to focus on one topic (curves) allowed us to get quite far.
  • Putting the effort into creating design tasks is helping particularly for community contribution.
  • Community involvement keeps growing.
  • The prioritization of the design discussions with the agenda is super.
  • Having a tag for Needs-Docs made documentation fun.
  • The process is mature enough and organic that is part of everyone’s responsivility not only of a “scrum-master”.
  • Weekly planning for alignment and communication is also helpful for contributors.

What didn’t work

  • The big picture of the project leg could have been re-iterated and re-validated more often:
    • Volume was in the original agenda and yet it wasn’t worked on.
  • The preparation prior to the meetings was not sufficient.
  • No new artist is as integrated yet in the ongoing project as much as Simon is.
    • No other artists were added as review to the patches.
  • A lot of the curves development didn’t preceed a presented (approved) design that could have been discussed.
    • The team lacked shared context for the use cases.
  • Design was a big bottleneck.
  • The sprint planings were not clear enough to everyone available.
    • Even without taking time from the planning more details can be added to the tasks that are not clear.
    • Patches (or tasks) could come with the developer’s test file more often.

What we would like to do to improve

  • Rename “Ready for Testing” to “Waiting for Feedback/Review”.
    • A task can be in said column when it is ready for feedback (even if it is not done).
    • If review/feedback will take time to be addressed, author may move task back to In Progress
    • Leaving the column really for things that spmeone can go and help by testing/feedback/review
  • Getting more artists involved in the modules meetings.
  • Remember to prioritize the tasks that are needed for the product.
    • Not fall for the trap of trying to find specific tasks for the individual contributors.
  • Tasks should be considered everyone’s responsibility.
    • People should feel empowered to take on tasks that are high priority and not tackled.
    • People should be open about not monopolizing a topic and treat them as a team effort.
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