In preparation for the VEX IQ and VEX U5 robot competition for teenagers, we attended the RoboCup in Eindhoven. Ithaki’s goal for VEX is to apply the principles of Agile within teams of students to solve specific challenges (planning, decision making & self-organisation). The RoboCup seemed to be an excellent starting point to get some inspiration. At the RoboCub, there are competitions related to rescue, home services, industrial application and the main highlight is various competitions of robot soccer. During a match of robot soccer, teams of robots play together autonomously, without any interference of the developers. To achieve this, it is essential to work in a highly organized manner.
It turned out it was not so easy to fully achieve our objective: the teams were separated from the audience, so it is hard to figure out what is exactly going on. And hence it was not so easy to get a good understanding to what extend Agile practices were applied.
We did not notice any team that visualise their tasks during the event. We did see teams frantically make design changes during the midway break in a soccer game. It looked very chaotic where it was unclear who had the overview of what still needed to be done.
All teams had prepared posters presenting their work / approach. These posters displayed the final results, with all components explained separately. However, there was little information about Agile practices (information about mistakes they made & lessons they learned). If there was information about how the team structure looked like, it was the traditional approach of specialisation (software – hardware – strategy – logistics – coordination).
Another common element is that many teams rely on 1 or 2 persons who do most of the critical work. As an anecdote, in some teams, some team members were playing Brawlstars, while others were doing the work.
We did not see any evidence of reflection moments (e.g. retrospectives) nor standups.
In conclusion, we had a fun trip. That said, we were unable to detect agile practices we would like to copy. Maybe this is because it was hard for us to really engage with the teams. Maybe, agility is not so common in teams that mainly operate in universities or research institutes.
That said, it was an enjoyable event inspiring us to create & innovate.
Ruben, Mathijs, Jeroen, Bram, Kasper, Maarten & Wilfried