The First Sprint

Enough research, enough thinking, I need to just start. The only way I could ever learn is by making mistakes, right? It still didn't make things much easier, but I needed to start being the Decider.

Since the team is small, we went with two week sprints and short meetings: 1 hour planning, 5 minute tag-ups, 1 hour post-op, and 1 hour reflection. I am still not comfortable bringing in the boss (product owner) so I decided that my team would also fill that role. We added a meeting to decide what are the most important scientific questions we could feasibly tackle? It gives the student more control over her masters but also leaves the door open for the real boss later.

We labeled research questions as User Stories, e.g. Characterize neurophysiology equipment or Implement an inverted pendulum model. After an hour, we had enough stories for 2-3 sprints so we called it a day.    

Two days later was the planning meeting where we decided how many stories to tackle, and what tasks each of those stories would need. After 30 mins the whiteboard was full and we started estimating task timeboxes. Within 10 mins everything was assigned and we were under committed (i.e. less work to do than working hours). Either we had been very optimistic or had forgotten tasks.

 The first meeting exposed a few pit-falls we would need to avoid. 

• Tasks could not be picked up by anyone. The student and equipment were in the USA, I am in Switzerland.
  
• I had 90 mins available to work on this project each day. I added short tasks just to have something to say at tag-ups. Those tasks were less relevant.
  

Problem 2 was fixed when I remembered other areas of this project I need to produce results for, but that only exacerbates problem 1. I have a conference next week and then the sprint starts next Monday - lets see how it goes...