Advice For Agile/Scrum Robot Development

[GreyingJay]

If I could introduce the notion of the task board to my team, I would. You could have tasks assigned to subteams, or groups of people, not so much individuals, so in case Joe doesn't show up, Jane can see what tasks remain on the board and progress them, and Joe can take over again next time he's in.

But the other issue with FRC teams, at least mine, is that the mentors come from a variety of backgrounds and companies and experiences. Some may love agile as they saw it done at their workplace, others may hate it and want nothing to do with it. Trying to get buy-in from all of the mentors would be difficult, let alone then getting the students into it.

On a recent project at work we used a tool called Redmine. Overall I liked it. There was a lot of data entry involved to set up the sprints, stories, and tasks, and a lot of clicking around to assign tasks, progress them, track time, etc. I felt it was quite a lot of overhead (literally half my time as a scrum master was tracking everyone's tasks, adding new ones, planning the next sprints, managing daily standups, status meetings, ...) But a "lite" version could work for FRC teams. Just don't track to quite as much detail.