What are these project status and retrospective pages?

What are these posts?

I'm the lead for the "Yellow" squad in Canonical's collection of geographically distributed, agile squads. We're directed to work as needed on various web and cloud projects and technologies. Every Friday, our squad has a call to review what happened in the past week and see what we can learn from it. We follow a simple, evolving format that we keep track of on a wiki. I'm currently experimenting with dividing up the minutes into a project status post, a tricks post, and a topics post.

Why read the topics posts?

The point of the meeting, and of the minutes, is to share and learn. We are learning from our success and mistakes, as we pursue continuous improvement of our processes and the results they produce.  If you are interested in watching a fully distributed team try to follow a Lean path, come read.  We'd love to hear back from you, too.

Why read the tricks posts?

We keep track of the small tricks we learn.  These are often "micro" tricks, and often technical.  You might want to skim them in case something jumps out at you.  Putting them on the web means a Google search might find them in the future.  It also helps us keep a note so we don't forget.  We'd love to hear your own, related suggestions.

Why read the project status reports?

If you care about our current project, you might want to catch up.  If you don't, skip it.

What are we working on right now?

Our current project, as of July 2012, is applying LXC virtualization to the 5+ hour test suite of the Launchpad web application. By parallelizing the test suite across lightweight virtual machines on the same box, we've gotten the time down to under 40 minutes. That's still not ideal, but it is a whole lot better.

Relatedly, we're also working on some setup scripts for Launchpad.