This is the first of what will be many sprint-report blog posts. Heather and I (Jason) have drunk deeply of the agile kool-aid, and we’re excited about working in two-week sprints; we’re also excited about documenting the results of each sprint on this blog. There’s a 15-minute cap on writing these posts, though, so…don’t expect Shakespeare (that’s like a 20-minute job for sure).

The theme of this sprint was getting TI ready for a pretty major rewrite aimed at improving the documentation, API and making it easier for open-source contributors to, well, contribute. This’ll b a pretty big deal; we’re going to be working with some external devs (more on that when we’ve got official news, but it looks like there will be some funding) and it’s important to have TI in a place where it’s easy for them to contribute.

With Jason travelling most of the time and fighting food poisoning the rest of the time, Heather had to come up big. Luckily that’s the only way to come up that Heather knows. She wrote some great spec and user stories, and moved issues from the GitHub tracker into our new backlog spreadsheet. We both worked on submitting a grant application (more on that later).

Overall, we’re both pretty happy with how the sprint system is working, although it’s going to be nicer when we’re actually shipping code at the end instead of spec.

This next sprint is built around more preparation for an epic one after that, where we hope to actually get much of the rewrite done. For now, Heather will be doing more documentation, particularly of the all-important plugins that get external data into the system, while I’ll be working on my Python skills as well as getting comfortable with libraries we’ll be using.