Agile

To keep current with project development practices in the professional world, we use two forms of Agile processes.

Agile Scrum

Agile scrum works in 2 week sprints.  This works well for the robot build because we only have 8 weeks to build the robot from the time the competition game is announced. There is a "backlog" which is a list of tickets that need to be done, and an "active sprint board" where only the tickets for the current sprint appear.

Agile Kanban

Kanban is used for things that are less specific to a timeframe, so our business and media teams use Kanban. Kanban focuses on continously adjusting the order of the backlog to move the most important things to the top of the list.

Things they have in common

In either Scrum or Kanban there are many similarites

  • Refinement - work on cleaning up tickets in the backlog to make sure they have enough details for people to work on them.
  • Acceptance Criteria (ACs)  - a list that a refined ticket must have, to tell the person working on it what is needed to consider the ticket "done".
  • Planning - prioritizing and sequencing the work that will get moved to the board or put in a sprint. 
  • Agile got its start as a framework for software development then later became a valued process applicable to all kinds of development. While Kanban started with the Japanese auto manufacturing process in the 1940's and has spread to all kinds of production and development.

Resources