Core Contributor Sprint Retro - 04 February 2023 - 18 February 2023

[antoviaque (Xavier Antoviaque (OpenCraft) - opencraft.com/help)]

@Ali

In hindsight, I could’ve spent more time thinking of meaningful/interesting discussion points to add to the AMEA meeting agenda. That may encourage more community members to attend. Same goes for agendas of other community meet-ups.

@ali_hugo Was the issue that the meeting had too few people? Giving a topic can definitely help – also sometimes reaching out individually before the meeting to people you or other attendees would like to know more can be quite effective.

And +1 that the attendance issue can be an issue in a number of meeting. @jalondonot actually brought up an interesting conversation about this during the contributor meetup, and came up with interesting improvements to try out – I’ll let him explain it though

@Felipe

I’m receiving the reminder for this checking late on Friday when I no longer see the email. Then I’m answering sometime on Monday when it is late already. Anyone else having this issue?

@Fox_Piacenti ^ It looks like we still have issues with the notifications:

• As @Felipe mentioned above, they now arrive at seemingly different times than before, and it can be a bit late in the day to see it in time before completion. Others in the contributors meetup agreed, and we discussed that it would be better to receive the first notification on Thursday (mid-day seemed fine - ie noon UTC), and the second one early on Monday (so midnight / 00:01 UTC)
• Also @mgmdi mentioned that she hasn’t received a notification since January - and if that’s the case for her, there might be others in the same situation?

@mgmdi

I merged a PR last week (feat: added organization dropdown in studio by Ian2012 · Pull Request #30975 · openedx/edx-platform · GitHub), which added a dropdown for organizations in studio. I tried testing the feature thoroughly, but it still caused some issues for instructors on edx.org. The error happened when turning on the feature flag: SPLIT_LIBRARY_ON_DASHBOARD, which we missed completely, since that flag is turned off by default and unittests didn’t catch it. Anyway, I wonder if we could’ve caught that earlier or our QA could’ve been better. I’ll keep this in mind for future contributions.

We had an interesting discussion about this during the contributors meetup - the root cause of the issue seem to have been that the configuration on stage was different than on production, and as a result the testing done on stage didn’t allow to spot the issue. So the QA and review process employed seem to have been fine, but it would be worth investigating & fixing the configuration difference on stage for feature flags, to allow to spot similar issues in the future. @mgmdi will bring it up with the people at 2U/edX with whom she has been in contact for this issue.

Sprint updates

And as usual, I’ve grouped together the different updates from the report above, to make it easier to read & digest:

• Dev:
  • Analytics: Progress on integrating Superset with Clickhouse, storing xAPI events (@jill|)
  • Event routing backend (@Zia_Fazal)
• Large Instances DevOps:
  • The project has a new name, openedx-k8s-harmony (@braden)
  • Merged ADR on OEP-45 Deploying Open edX on Kubernetes Using Helm (@Felipe)
  • Work on formalizing the working group & managing permissions (@antoviaque, @Felipe, @regisb)
• Core contributors - work scope definition merged (OEP-54 amendment) (@antoviaque)
• Documentation:
  • Reviewed updates to the release notes process on the wiki (@pdpinch)
  • Upstreaming course - Review & discuss contributions with new contributors, prepare remote sprint (@antoviaque)
• Events:
  • AMEA meet-up organization (@ali_hugo)
  • Conference talk - start preparing slides (@antoviaque)
• TOC Meeting - Prepare & attend (@antoviaque)
• Translations in French Canadian (@sambapete)
• PR Review (@ali_hugo, @Felipe, @antoviaque, @pdpinch)
• Answered questions on the forum (@sambapete)