Our first Neos sprint in 2016 happened in Dresden, Germany hosted by Sandstorm. We had the whole conference area in the Bio Innovation Center to code, discuss and focus on specific topics we had on the agenda for the week. In the evenings we also found time to get together as a team and socialize: we got a special city tour through Dresden by Florian, spent an evening playing laser tag and two nights coding/relaxing with pizza. Another highlight was that Dmitri from Russia and Dominique and Samuel from Switzerland could join the sprint!

Check out more impressions from the sprint on our Facebook page!

Sprint Outcomes

React UI Rewrite

Tyll and Wilhelm from Sitegeist, who recently joined the Neos teams, gave an introduction to React development on Monday to onboard interested developers into the project. Read about our React endeavour on Dmitri's blog and join the discussion on Discourse!

Release Management

We have taken a decision on release management for Neos and Flow. There will be a separate announcement coming soon, but to spoil a little, we aim for fixed release dates and LTS versions! 

More details are announced here!

Update to our team structure/project organisation

Following the agile teams we adopted in October we are putting in the first bigger change to make us more effective: we are embracing the fact that projects get done more naturally across teams and thus now have three organisational elements:

• teams as homebases for members to ease onboarding and connectedness
• guilds as knowledge hubs for certain topics
• projects as places where most of the work happens (see current projects list on Discourse)

Marketing and Communication

Definitely an area where we want to improve! We have identified a few focus areas:

• website relaunch
• case studies - in depth reviews of Neos/Flow projects to show what both are capable of
• a communication plan for Inspiring Conference to coordinate all the great news we have to share

Legal Entity

We agreed that Neos does need its own legal entity and we have investigated several possible routes for the Neos Project. In a session at the sprint we discussed pros and cons and came up with a favorite which we are checking for compatibility with our goals and requirements at the moment. We will have more to announce soon.

Retrospective

Gina, also a new Neos team member, led the retro in Dresden which had a number of great outcomes. The most visible is the adjusted team structure. Yet we also had some great discussions about kitchen duties and the projects vision. Both are still work in progress but the results we achieved as part of the discussions resonated very well with the sprint participants.

Next sprint: Rosenheim

We are already planning the next sprint: 18th - 21st April

Just before Inspiring Conference we will meet in Rosenheim for our next sprint. If you are interested in Neos and Flow use this chance to meet lots of team members and add yourself to the attendees list on doodle.

All information for the sprint planning are on Discourse.

We are looking forward to the next sprint!