Sprint 3 – scrum-ing
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Hi, In order to continue with our project of designing game concept in an agile way, we had a sprint planning at the beginning of the week. What is a sprint planning? Sprint planning is a tool for agile scrum method, in which a project owner, together with scrum master and development team, decides about features they shall develop through the upcoming week. Those features are taken from a product backlog and considered as primary features that have the highest priority in given time. How do we implement it? We set up a group meeting (in this case without the project owner). In the beginning, we discuss a sprint goal, the main goal we want to achieve through the sprint and then according to it, each member respectively picks up the features that are related to the goal. As a scrum master, I give them about 10-15 minutes to decide and put the features on a sprint backlog sheet. They have to fill up the name of the feature, their names and estimated time for each feature to be worked on during the sprint. After everyone has done his part, we start a discussion about it. In the discussion, they go through their part of the process, tell about possible risks, threats and strengths and when each of the members is done, I conclude the meeting.
Figure 1. An example of sprint sheet Why sprint planning? As I have said, we are being taught about agile way of working on a project because it is a course goal. Since agile means iterative work with small increments of a product, a sprint planning is a crucial tool for achieving that goal. It gives the team an accurate overview of the progress and helps to motivate the team as well as accentuate the problems if they appear. That way, it is easier to focus on a problem at a very early stage of the development and fix it rather than waiting the later stages (in traditional project methods, for example), in which case it takes much longer time to pinpoint it and fix it since a lot of work has been put into the product and that work will probably be obsolete or useless.  |
