Lesson 5

Your Three-Week Status Report

Once per sprint, you sit down and take stock of your own work. What got done, what is next, what is in your way. That is the status report. It is due before your three-week 1-on-1, and it is the document we both look at while we talk.

It is not a big assignment. It is your reflection on your own work, and it should leave you with a clearer idea of what to do next. Twenty minutes. If it is taking an hour, you are writing an essay instead of a report.

Open the example first. It is one page, and it will tell you more than this page will.

How to make one

Copy the template into your own student folder in Drive at the start of the sprint. Name it to match its title:

Status Sprint 3 Casey Rivera

If the document name and the heading inside do not match, it will get lost. This happens every year.

Then add to it as you go, a couple of lines at a time. The report is not a thing you write the night before. It is a thing you keep. If you get in the habit of jotting a couple of lines in your notebook at the end of a session, most of the raw material is already sitting there waiting for you to collect, not invent. If you have not been doing that, this is your cue to start.

Print it at the printing session near the end of the sprint and bring the paper to your 1-on-1.

The goals table

Most of the report is one table, one row per goal, with a status code:

N = New
D = Done
L = Late, which is fine
C = Changed, new date or description
R = Reassigned

Rows carry forward. Last sprint’s goals show up again with updated codes, which is the point: across three or four reports you can see your own pattern in a way you cannot see inside a single week.

Put an asterisk next to any date you changed. Late is fine. Quietly moving a date and hoping nobody remembers the old one is not.

The rest of the template is short. A photo of something you did, an optional list of concerns, your work log, and your retro.

Goals and retro are not the same thing

This is the distinction that collapses if nobody names it.

The goals table is about outcomes. Did the claw close on the sample. Did the float hold depth. Results.

The retro is about process. Not “I did not finish the claw” but “I started the claw in week three, both sprints in a row, and here is what I am changing.” Causes.

If your retro is a list of things you did not finish, you wrote the goals table twice and skipped the retro. You can either paste in your team’s retro from the retro template or write your own reflection.

Your hours

The work log is your timecard, and that record belongs to you. Date, hours, a few words. “W2, 2 hours, class, wired the ESC harness” is a complete entry.

The rule that keeps it honest: hours should attach to something in the goals table. Two hours with nothing to show for it happens to everyone sometimes. A whole sprint of it is a conversation, not a number.

If you play a sport, you do not need to make up every hour of missed class time, but you do need to do some work every week, and it needs to show up here.

What “not yet” looks like

Status	Date	Item	Note
N	soon	Claw	Made good progress, will finish it

Three problems in one row. “Soon” is not a date. “Made good progress” is not a quantity, so there is nothing here anyone can check. “Finish it” is not a state anyone can point at and say yes or no.

And a retro that says everything went fine, three sprints running, means either a miracle happened or you stopped looking.

What clears

Status	Date	Item	Note
D	10/2/26	Jaw prototype v2	Printed. Closes on 1.5 in PVC at the bench, slips on the round sample.
D	10/2/26	Servo current test	Stall current 1.4 A, under our 2 A fuse
C	10/16/26*	Jaw v3, deeper tooth	Was 10/9. Waiting on frame clearance check with Noah.
N	10/23/26	Servo vs stepper DDR	Not started, due before sprint review

Concerns are not only engineering problems. If something with your team, or between people, is getting in your way and you are comfortable putting it in writing, it belongs here too. Concerns for that same report:

The 2 mm tooth change may not clear the frame rail. Need ten minutes with the frame team Tuesday.
M3 standoffs ordered 9/22 have not arrived. If they miss next week the mount slips a sprint.

Every Done row names a thing that now exists, plus a number or an observation. Every open row has a date and a state someone can check. Every concern names a person to talk to or a date at risk.

Notice that every row here is a fair question for a 90 second oral check. That is the actual test of whether a row was worth writing.

How this gets checked

Filed or not filed is what gets tracked. Nobody is scoring your rows line by line.

At your 1-on-1, expect me to pick one row from your own report and ask you one live question about it. I may also spot-check one card on your signoff sheet the same way. Same rule as everything else on this site: written work is preparation, the live question is the check.

At the team retro on the first Tuesday of the next sprint, your team compares its sprint commitment against what its members actually reported. That comparison is the real audit, and your team runs it, not me. Everyone walks in having already written their individual retro, so that meeting starts with material instead of silence.

About AI

Use whatever tools you use to write this. Your teacher uses AI for status reports sometimes too. The bar is not where the words came from, it is whether the rows are true, because you will be asked about one of them out loud.