Sprint and sprint planning
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Sprint and sprint planning
What / Last time I talked about the scrum. Today, I would like to talk more in depth about the sprint, the planning of it and the review. As scrum is an agile method with iteration, sprint is the minor aspect in the scrum. To easily define, scrum is the big chunk and sprint is small slices. For example, if scrum has big backlogs such as main character, in the sprint it would be specified as main character animation, main character design, main character sound and so on. How / For our team, sprint was changed with one week rotation. Each week we would hold a meeting at school or library and see how we went for the week and what we are going to do in next week. This was in other words called the sprint planning. In the scrum book that I read, it is said that the project manager should choose the sprints for the team depending on the way the project is heading. However, we did in a bit different way as game designers. Our team is composed of a producer (project manager) who is me, a game designer, a graphic designer and two programmers. Instead of me picking up the sprints for team mates, I asked what they are going to do each week. For us if the team as a whole, has a big picture, the graphic designer decides what to draw for the week. Than the programmers code with the outcome of the graphic. While doing this work, the game designer would check if the art and movement of the character are fitting the overall story concept of the game. So this is how we did our sprint planning.
Why / The reason I chose to manage the team like this is because I am a student. Or I would say lack of knowledge and experience related to the area. Before I started this course, I barely had no idea about ‘game’. I was not a heavy game maniac nor had interest in it. Therefore, when I were authorized to manage the team that is making a shoot em up theme game, it was hard for me to divide the work to the team. So I let the team to choose what they would want to accomplish each week. And I make sure that they are doing what they have planned.
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