Publications

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In our development team at Sandia National Laboratories we have honed our Scrum processes to where we continually deliver high-performance engineering analysis software to our customers. We deliver despite non-ideal circumstances, including development work that can be categorized as exploratory research, regular use of part-time developers, team size that varies widely among Sprints, highly specialized technical skill sets and a broad range of deliverables. We believe our methodologies can be applied to many research-oriented environments such as those found in government laboratories, academic institutions and corporate research facilities. Our goal is to increase the adoption of Lean/Agile project management in these environments by sharing our experiences with those research-oriented development teams who are considering using Lean/Agile, or have started and are encountering problems. In this paper we discuss how we create and prioritize our product backlog, write our user stories, calculate our capacity, plan our Sprints, report our results and communicate our progress to customers. By providing guidance and evidence of success in these areas we hope to overcome real and perceived obstacles that may limit the adoption of Lean/Agile techniques in research-oriented development environments. © 2013 IEEE.

This paper presents a counterintuitive Pre-Sprint Work Balancing methodology that has substantially increased the ability of our highly heterogeneous Scrum [1] team to deliver what it promises at the end of each sprint. The process essentially consists of preplanning steps that acknowledge both the heterogeneity in developer's time and skill level, as well as Product Owner priorities. These preplanning activities act as a starting point for negotiations with the team during the Sprint Planning Meeting. For our team, delivery of all promised tasks in a sprint has increased from less than 1/3 of our sprints to more than 2/3, with indications that we are heading towards nearly 100% delivery. © 2012 IEEE.

This report describes the activities and results of a Sandia LDRD project whose objective was to develop and demonstrate foundational aspects of a next-generation nuclear reactor safety code that leverages advanced computational technology. The project scope was directed towards the systems-level modeling and simulation of an advanced, sodium cooled fast reactor, but the approach developed has a more general applicability. The major accomplishments of the LDRD are centered around the following two activities. (1) The development and testing of LIME, a Lightweight Integrating Multi-physics Environment for coupling codes that is designed to enable both 'legacy' and 'new' physics codes to be combined and strongly coupled using advanced nonlinear solution methods. (2) The development and initial demonstration of BRISC, a prototype next-generation nuclear reactor integrated safety code. BRISC leverages LIME to tightly couple the physics models in several different codes (written in a variety of languages) into one integrated package for simulating accident scenarios in a liquid sodium cooled 'burner' nuclear reactor. Other activities and accomplishments of the LDRD include (a) further development, application and demonstration of the 'non-linear elimination' strategy to enable physics codes that do not provide residuals to be incorporated into LIME, (b) significant extensions of the RIO CFD code capabilities, (c) complex 3D solid modeling and meshing of major fast reactor components and regions, and (d) an approach for multi-physics coupling across non-conformal mesh interfaces.

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