Advice For Agile/Scrum Robot Development

[tsetse fly]

Originally Posted by Sid323

Some of the aspects that we were planning on using include the sprint time management approach in which small groups set a short timeline in which to complete a small project, a task-based project management system (I had suggested Trello), and rapid iterations of basic existing systems. I really like your suggestions on retrospectives and the stand-ups, especially due to their focus on communication between sub-teams.

However, I'm not sure why you advised against sprints. Our team is currently in a situation where we won't have any flexibility beyond our scheduled meeting times due to non-cooperation from the school administration, and our president thought that sprints would be a great way to keep students focused on their short term project goals.

Just to reply to the question on sprints, you can definitely identify and define a set of work for the week (call that a sprint, making that a week?) and focus on that. In Agile/Scrum once that next sprint is set, you don't adjust or change it. Or to be a little more flexible as in FRC there are lots of different types of activities going on, you can use that Trello board and operate more of a Kanban approach than Scrum. Moving and managing all those different elements of work of the team through phases of completion.

However you approach it, you can't go wrong with spending more time than you probably already are - planning the work to be done, making it visible to your team and keeping everyone aware of the progress of all those things going on.

"In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable."
Dwight D. Eisenhower

[GreyingJay]

I see the benefits mostly in breaking down the big tasks into smaller, manageable sprints each with smaller stories, broken further into tasks. At work, a task should be something that one developer could do in a day or two. A sprint would be about two weeks.

For FRC, perhaps a sprint is a week, maybe two. A task could be a chunk of work that one student could do in one build meeting, whether that's a 3-hour evening or an 8-hour day or however your team works.

For example, your first sprint could have three stories and look something like:

Sprint 1:
- Assemble the KOP chassis
--- Cut the frame pieces to size
--- Assemble the frame and cross pieces
--- Assemble motors and gearboxes

- Wire up the control system
--- Build battery cable and circuit breaker connector
--- Connect the PCM, VRM, PDP
--- Wire the RoboRio power and CAN
--- Connect the bridge
--- Connect the motor controllers

- Prototype mechanism idea
--- Build plywood frame
--- Build wheel and axle driven by drill motor
--- Experiments to determine best placement