How to? Getting things done...

[jds2001]

Wow, quite the necro

But as mentioned above (I'm a software architect at $DAYJOB, lead mentor/doer of nothing, director of everything in FRC - pretty much the same thing!), I've found that Scrum works very well in a professional environment when you actually have an iterable piece of software. In robotics, those iterations are a lot different - you're building a physical machine. You can't really have a "shippable increment". Of course there's software that needs to run on it, but that's but a small piece.

Another important part of making Scrum work in a professional setting is that only those directly involved in deliverables for the day are invited to the Scrum meetings. I'm not invited to our $DAYJOB daily Scrum meetings, nor should I be. The team is self-organizing for a reason. I really don't think that such a model would work with a robotics team.

Now what do I think might work? A simple Kanban board (think Trello) that contains small, separable things to do that could be moved into the done column as appropriate. I've tried this with my team, due to the unique dynamics of the team (look into some of my other posts for details), it really didn't work well, but I don't think that's universal and I think it would work great for many teams.

Interested to hear other's experiences as well....