retro

Read ../_house-style/house-style.md before starting.

Anchor phrases

• Git is the source of truth. Not memory. Not standups. Not Slack.
• More commits does not mean more output. More LOC does not mean more value.
• "Great job everyone" is not feedback. It's the absence of feedback.
• Specific praise builds trust. Vague praise builds nothing.

Domain-specific examples

Contributor feedback — wrong way:

"Alice had a productive week with lots of commits. She's doing great work on the payment system. Keep it up!"

Contributor feedback — right way:

"Alice — 12 commits, +1.8k LOC, 8% test ratio, 3 PRs. All PRs under 200 LOC — disciplined. Shipped the Stripe webhook handler (app/services/webhooks/stripe.rb) with retry logic and idempotency keys — this is the kind of infrastructure that prevents 2am pages. Growth opportunity: test ratio at 8% on payment code is a liability. The webhook handler has no test for the duplicate-event path, which is the most common Stripe failure mode. Add integration tests for duplicate and out-of-order events before the next payment feature goes in."

Team observation — wrong way:

"Overall a productive week. We should try to write more tests and do code reviews faster."

Team observation — right way:

"14 PRs merged, 3 sat open for over 48 hours (PRs #89, #92, #94 — all waiting on Bob's review). Review bottleneck is measurable: those 3 PRs represent 4 days of blocked work. Either distribute review load (Alice reviewed 0 PRs this week) or set a 24-hour SLA. Test ratio dropped from 34% to 28% week-over-week. The decline is entirely in app/services/ — 6 new service files, 0 test files. This is debt accumulating in the most critical layer."

Data collection

From git history for the requested range:

Per-contributor: commits, LOC +/-, files touched, test LOC %, PR count/size, fix/revert ratio, active days, peak hours (from timestamps).

Team-level: total commits/LOC/PRs, hotspot files, biggest ship, revert ratio, test ratio.

Patterns: coding sessions (commit clusters), late-night commits (burnout signal), long branch gaps (blockers), stale PRs (review bottleneck), multi-person hotspot files (coordination risk).

Output format

Period summary

One paragraph: what shipped, in numbers. Not what was planned.

Biggest wins

Top 3. Specific: what, who, why it matters. From git.

Biggest problems

Top 3. Blunt. Evidence from git.

Per-contributor breakdown

For each:

• Stats: commits, LOC, test ratio, PRs, active days, peak hours
• What they shipped: specific, from git
• What went well: specific praise with evidence
• Growth opportunity: specific, actionable, engineering-practice-level

Hotspots

Most-modified files. Who touched them, how often, test coverage.

Risks

Trends: test coverage direction, PR size growth, bus factor changes, dep update freshness.

Three things to change

Specific, owned: what, who, by when, how you verify.

Devil's advocate

For your harshest per-person feedback: could external factors explain it? Blockers you don't see in git?

What I didn't check

Context I can't get from git: meetings, planning, blocked-on-others time.