Journal 4

Demo 4. Reflect on your learning so far. You may use the same format you used for the following assignment: student introduction

You should complete this assignment before the next lecture. Prof. Crawley is interested to get feedback on how the class is being run (e.g. using Agile mode and XLP tool). He wants to understand if there's any significant impact (good or bad) on how you're learning. Please share with us any details. For example, Is XLP/Agile making you more or less efficient in managing your time? Has it been difficult to self-organize for sprint 4? You can also tell us about issues or roadblock you encountered when working on your fourth sprint.

In general, tell us how we can make the class better for your needs. Please feel free to share additional information that can help us understand if our Agile/XLP methods are helping you learn more effectively ( or less)

Hiro Furufu

As we discussed in the presentation, the method of cost estimation is a big problem. We asked Bob how to breakdown the estimated cost that NASA suggested about research and development of rover and habitats, but he said the data source of the estimates is NASA’s secret. Maybe, it’s a critical part of NASA to gain budget from Congress. Many estimates which space researchers suggest contain a lot of uncertainty and thus tend to be overestimated. During sprint 5 and 6, I hope we could have a reasonable method to calculate the uncertain space project.

Ryan de Freitas Bart

Although this sprint was a short one the team was able to do a good initial analysis of the Mars mission trade space. The team has really come a long way and works really well together now, with a pretty well-defined process for approaching the sprint and working towards our solution. The sprint demo also went well and overall there isn't any large items I think need to be improved in the process now. The agile methodology has been working well for the team as well, even though it causes us to move through analysis faster than we usually would using a traditional approach as we are moving onto a new topic for the next sprint. However, in the final sprints as we look back at our other architectures to develop our final Moon-Mars architecture we will get the chance to shore up any areas we didn't feel that we delved deep enough into on earlier sprints.