Jacob SC3

• Chapter 7: How does our team do a good job of being transparent?  Where is it opaque and unclear in its workings?  Be honest.

In our team, it is easy to walk down and ask about or just look at what is being done on the robot.  We also made our general strategy pretty available as well.  That's where the transparency starts to deteriorate: changes in design (front/back load, wheel arrangement, drive train, etc) are not always communicated to all members, there is a very apparent divide between the programming, mechanical, and media people with each doing their own thing, and I personally have had to deal with the challenges of what people want while designing CAD models.  This lack of transparency caused many delays last season and it needs to be fixed.

• Chapter 7: Sutherland talks about the importance of measuring velocity every sprint (even though it can be tedious at times).  How does knowing velocity affect a sense of growth?  Why is it needed to identify the "happy bubble"?

Any business cannot know it's success if it does not have an idea of it's velocity.  Velocity means speed in a given direction so to know ones velocity is to know how quickly a business is approaching or passing it's goal.  If it is moving rapidly in the right direction growth is good and is perceived as such.  If it is not moving, but the company is happy a happiness bubble may be forming.

• Chapter 8: A product owner needs to be knowledgeable about the domain, empowered to make decisions, available to the team, and accountable for value.  What specifically are we looking for in a product owner for a FRC team?  Do we need more than one?

In a FRC team a product owner would have to have a great understanding of the rules of the game and what role the teams robot is supposed to play.  They would also need to have an idea of what can actually be made and an idea of a time frame for these things.  This would require somebody who has at least a baseline understanding of every section and knows a great deal about the majority of pieces or is willing to work with others to arrange tasks for their weak areas.  For our team we might need more than one product owner;  this is largely due to the transparency issue I mentioned earlier since most people are rather restricted to their faction and don't know much about the others (mechanical/media).  If we fix this problem it could become feasible to have only one, but they would have to be around all the time and be well informed on just about everything.

• Chapter 8: "Prioritizing everything is prioritizing nothing."  What do you think are the five highest priority items for our FRC team?  Put them in order 1-5.

1. Prepare kids for future involving STEM principles

2. Build an amazing, functional, and legal robot

3. Recruit new people who are willing to learn

4. Raise money and awareness

5. Have fun (make it to nationals/worlds)

6 or 1. World domination (don't tell Paul we're doing it without him)

• Chapter 9: Summarize one story from Chapter 9 and explain why it gets you excited about using a proper implementation of scrum with our FRC team.

The chapter that struck me as most significant was the application of scrum in schools.  The teacher literally had the students divide themselves up into cross functional teams and organize their own learning.  This has alleviated some of my worries since this worked so well in a high school I really think it can work on our team

• Summary

In these chapters I learned about transparency and how essential it is, how happiness affects results, and about a few real world situations where scrum was used.  The situations especially helped me to understand how our team can implement and use scrum to improve our productivity.