How do we feel about scheduling highly-targetted "bursts" of work? | Project management | Forum

There are a few crucial design decisions which we still do not seem to have reached a definite conclusion and and which are really holding us back by virtue of our not being able to make other decisions until these first ones are taken care of.  Some obvious ones include whether or not the engines in our modular boosters will be solid, liquid or hybrid fuelled and exactly how our various systems and supplies are going to be distributed between the service module and command module.

In order to knock these decisions out, how do people feel about scheduling highly-targetted "bursts" of work?  Say, we decide that a particular weekend is going to be dedicated to the booster fuel decision problem.  We give one or two weeks advance notice so that everybody interested can read up on the relevant subjects and come up with some ideas.  On that weekend we all get together on IRC or Skype or something and discuss nothing but the one targetted issue for that weekend's "burst".  If this works well maybe we can make it a regular thing and have bursts every month or so?

What do people think about this approach?  The biggest problem with this that I can forsee is probably the potential for timezone issues.  If we could find a way to minimise those, would people be interested in this sort of thing?

That Wave link doesn't work for me. :(

2100Z is 0630 for me, and is 0230 for Zvan in Mumbai.  These aren't very ideal times, but I'm not sure we can do an awful lot better.  1300Z would be 2230 for me, 0800 in New York and 1830 in Mumbai.  This is perhaps a little better but might be too early for a lot of our US members.

I'm glad you approve of the overall idea, though.

An IRC room would be great for this. And we should cache all the chat sessions, does any one know any bot for this?

I am not great with IRC systems

By the way, if anybody can think of a cooler name than "work bursts" for these, feel free to yell it out.

I got the idea from the NetBSD project's "hackathons", where people get together on IRC for a weekend to close NetBSD bug reports or upgrade software in the package management repositories, etc.  "Engineerathon" doesn't really sound anywhere near as good, though.

The only other similar concept I am familiar with is the "sprint" from software development, which I suppose isn't too bad of a name.

As a slight aside: reading the Wikipedia article for sprinting has just made me reaslise that maybe we should look to the agile development movement for ideas on design principles.

Post edited 7:33 am – February 10, 2010 by Rizwan

Any one else think we should revive this now that we have an IRC Channel?

I would love to see us pull of a burst or two.  I would prefer IRC for this over Wave, but not too strongly.  Using both could work well, using IRC as the default place to disscuss things and then jumping to Wave when multimedia capabilities are needed.

That said, I am not exactly sure what a profitable wave could be at the moment.  We pretty much have CLLARE sketched out  in as much detail as people with our level of knowledge can manage, I think.

Even aside from bursts, we should probably start hanging out in IRC more.  I've stopped by a few times to find the channel only containing Elleo.

Nice job!  I have responded.

We should also come up with a theme for the meeting so we can better focus our efforts.

Either an OHKLA-related "work burst" or a SpaceUp organisation session would probably be best for now.

Can't run any IRC chatrooms or scripts since it is a shared server and it is against the TOS.

But getting a log of particular sessions shouldn't be difficult, since almost all IRC clients have logging capabilities.