Game Design 2: Blogpost #3, Scrum
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For this blog post I will be writing about Scrum and how it has affected Group Sirens work on the Behemoth game in Game Design 2. Group Siren is of course the group that I, Jonathan Berggren was in during this course. Scrum is an Agile framework for iterative development, in particular it is aimed mainly at software development. It starts with the creation of a product backlog, the products in our case were features for our game like the player ship, enemies and so forth. Each feature is given different artefacts in categories like code, art and sound that were given to the team members with that specific job in our group. After this the “sprints” are decided on, these are typically two weeks long but in our case we thought it was more appropriate with one-week (or more accurately 5 days) long sprints as we felt this better fitted our workload. At the start of each sprint (which we chose to hold on Mondays) a sprint-plan is made where each group member commits to working on certain artefacts for the sprint chosen from the product backlog. Every day during the sprint a daily standup meeting is held which is typically meant to only last around 15 minutes. We decided to only hold these during workdays (aka not on weekends) as everyone in the group also had work in their minors and we though it would be a good idea to assign these days so you could work on anything you might have in your minor course at the time. The goal of the daily standup is to have them at the same time every day and for the team members to answer three questions:
At the end of each Sprint (which we decided to hold on Fridays) there is a sprint review meeting where the team reviews the work that has been completed for that Sprint and all of the members review their own work and inform the other members if any work they committed to working on was not finished and if so why. This whole cycle is then repeated until the product (in our case the game) is completed or for a certain predetermined amount of time. Group Siren did not work using Scrum for the two previous assignments that we worked together on. The change to working in Scrum was somewhat tiring at first, especially the daily standup however from my experience it seemed like work was done noticeably faster using Scrum than in our previous assignments. All in all it seems that working in Scrum has been a success for optimizing the effectiveness of each team member at completing their work in our group.  |
