Here are my thoughts/experiences which might help current/future students.

TL;DR. Participating in implementation challenges and pairing up helps research.

• This work evolved due to our participation in DIMACS Implementation Challenge. 
  • participating in such challenges helps us find the right problem to work on. //Important step for a research scholar.
  • Organisers curate the more challenging and more relevant inputs. 
  • Irrespective of competition results, it is a win-win for research. If we win, we will get recognised. If we do not, we get the baselines (winners' solution code) 
  • In either case, if we continue to work on it further, we will have a paper out of it.
  • Our earlier Steiner work (a result of another implementation Challenge -- PACE) had an excellent leaderboard that quickly evaluated any new idea/heuristics we implemented. 
  • I wish we/I have a personal dashboard for every research problem we/I work on that also logs (with some scores/metrics) for every new heuristic/code version we attempt.
• Pairing up on research works (within and outside the group) always help. 
  • We had many brainstorming sessions (with/without advisors) with Somesh.
  • We had come up with several heuristics/ideas from those sessions. At times debugging too. 
  • That can push (to perform more) and pulls-up (whenever we feel low) each other. //It happened many times to me.
  • If everything goes well, we will have one more paper (at least) out of this CVRP work.
  • Thanks a lot, Somesh.