Coding Kick-off Meeting

Memories of a meeting that could have been helpful when we were a team working on Clicker. It actually happened with a EU project a bit later

• it was our ordinary 3-days-midweek meeting
• almost no professors involved, but everyone who would program anything for the project was present
• we came with machines ready to build the equivalent of a 'hello world' for the feature we're targetting. For Clicker, if we were to build a sound mixer, 'hello world' would have been being able to output a square wave. If it was to make a configuration tool on a foreign OS, 'hello world' would indeed be a window and an 'Hi.' button that tells it to proceed
• we would not try to have a polished outcome (that would be the job of a smaller, dedicated team, starting after the meeting) but to identify all as many as possible of the issues that could block the smaller team and prototype a solution to them. For the sound mixer, applying volume per channel could be left post-meeting, but deciding how to tell the channel's volume from a control pannel has to be prototyped. For the configuration tool, reporting ongoing progress bar must be prototyped, 
• people don't need to know the same technologies. If one coding team will use ncurses while another uses WxWidgets and two others go for electron, that's fine.
  

Now imagine if I had heard of that 'sprints' back then:

• Every morning, we spend one hour deciding what we are trying to achieve by the end of the day, what are the goals that are candidate to prototyping and which should get our attention first
• Each coding team spends 4-6h trying to prototype what has been decided
  
• (my 2 cents: If one team is done faster, they can use the remaining time to study the technologies picked by others, how they address what they've just done with that, rather than trying to tackle more objectives)  
• The end of the day is used to review what has been achieved, identify strengths and weaknesses of each approach, and update the list of candidate goals for the next day. "Oh, that makes me think: we'll definitely need a way to pick a file for ${purpose}". We'll see tomorrow morning if that is important enough to be one of the prototype goal of the meeting.

(Hopefully, at the end of the meeting, everyone has a better understanding of each others' skill with their technologies and some of the weaknesses of the technologies. Hopefully enough to decide the team and technology to actually implement the features)