Joining a second sprint team

I started with a second agile team today. This is a really exciting project and there's a lot to get my head around. So, joining the sprints has meant that although I've now got a lot more meetings in my calendar, I have also got daily access to the team putting this product together. That makes for a much easier experience when it comes to finding out what I need to enable me to write some user assistance.

And yes, my calendar is looking busier. With two sprint teams running concurrently (albeit a few days lag), there are now two days every ten working days that have the potential to get wiped out with meetings. And although there were gaps today, it was hard to get stuck into any of the high attentive tasks that I needed to get moving with. By default, the gaps got filled with easy stuff like answering emails, and filling in expense forms.

I don't envisage this remaining a problem, and even if it does, I'd sooner find myself with a bit less time, and with more information, than less information and oodles of time.

The tasks I got added were the three I added to the first sprint team's list.

• Write UA content
• Review UA content
• Update UA content

Although I only added them to one of the user stories.

There is definitely the potential for me to add a lot more to this project. There's still a lot I need to understand, and research on. I could have asked for a research task to be added, but I didn't see much need in it. If I'm doing a research task where I'm going to need input from the other sprint members then there's benefit in doing that, but otherwise, it felt like I was just clogging up the sprint backlog.

One thing I do need to sort out is my allocation spreadsheet. When you're working on one sprint team, it's easy to work out your capacity and plan accordingly. When working across teams, with different start and end dates for sprints, it's much harder.