ICDC Sprint 40 Retrospective

Date	10 Aug 2023
Participants	ICDC Team

Retrospective

List anything that went well in this sprint including shout out to others that went out of their way to help (add your name after your comment or feel free to keep it annonymous)
Working as a team to solve production release issues. Great work. (Udosen, Toyo (NIH/NCI) [C] )
Coordination on publishing new NPM packages (Rana, Ambar (NIH/NCI) [C] )
Our team faced many challenges this release cycle and I thought team members showed up for each other and sometimes worked outside of normal hours to make sure everything was resolved. Thank you also to our teammates from other teams that stepped in to help including Fleming, Michael (NIH/NCI) [C] and Donkor, Vincent (NIH/NCI) [C]. (Kuffel, Gina (NIH/NCI) [C] )
Despite the release issues, I think we've demonstrated that we can join forces and quickly/effectively troubleshoot. (Eric)
We successfully collaborated externally (CBIIT) and internally (Developer and DevOps mates)to resolve our deployment issues (Amit).
Our team devised a way to use a single package for different projects by labeling the package with different tags and versions.

List anything that we could have done better in this sprint (these comments will be anonymous)
Should have worked on publishing NPM package at the beginning or early stages of the bentofication. (Rana, Ambar (NIH/NCI) [C] )
We need more insight from DevOps once a user story is created, meaning we need guidance to understand if we need to file DevOps-related Jira tasks to support the user story. It would be good to know this ahead of time instead of when we are trying to promote a new microservice or feature.
Sometimes I feel like our team can do a better job of acknowledging and responding to messages on Slack and if that is not the preference of the team maybe we can have more impromptu meetings or huddles to be sure people aren't missing communications.
Backend team (i.e. me) should better communicate major backend changes to the rest of the team (I think some weren't aware of the move to an ICDC-specific Bento backend and this even contributed to a deployment issue). (Eric) <-- oops, not anonymous
We need to ensure we reduce our tech debt as it relates to DevOps by having near identical environments in lower and upper tiers (Amit).
Regarding Bentofication, I think it would be better if we could have a pipeline configured that will publish bento-core packages automatically.

I was able to learn more about the devOps side of things. (Udosen, Toyo (NIH/NCI) [C] ).
Alternative way of publishing NPM packages. (Rana, Ambar (NIH/NCI) [C] )
I learned a lot of DevOps-related stuff this sprint, more about the AWS Secrets Manager and our Jenkins Deploy pipelines. (Kuffel, Gina (NIH/NCI) [C] )
Learnt more about microservices and GraphQL queries(Unknown User (podagatlapalll2)
Learned about CloudFront caching especially using Signed URLs when a distribution is shared between domains (Amit).
I have learned about publishing packages to the npm registry, to be specific, I have learned a process in which we can publish packages with different versions based on the project that they will be used for.
From my work on building a new CMB-centric data model for the initial release of the CTDC, I've learned just how valuable our investment of time and resources into the Data Model Navigator has turned out to be. Being able to visualize a new model as it's being assembled, and being able to show the nascent model to interested parties has been incredibly useful and informative Musk, Philip (NIH/NCI) [C]

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