3rd post – Working with scrum
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In this week’s blog, I am going to write about scrum. It is an agile framework which is used in project management. It encourages adaption, teamwork, self-organization and customer collaboration. Scrum has timebox, which is called sprint, and it can be from 1 to 4 weeks long. All team members can choose assets to work on and at the end of the sprint they have to deliver a feature. This was the first time for our team to work with this method and we did not know exactly how it works. Last semester I was studying traditional project management, so I did not know much about agile or scrum. When our team had the first planning meeting I was not sure how a sprint planning or even a product backlog works. After having the meeting with our scrum master, who is like a couch, we understood how the backlog works and how to plan sprints. At the beginning, it was a bit strange to work with scrum, because we were not used to it and it took time to figure it out. However, now it is feels quite good to work with this agile framework, because we are more productive and we have clear goals in the project. Everybody picks some assets from the backlog to work with and it gives clear goal for a sprint. We decided to do 1 week sprints, since we have short time to deliver the product, which is the “Shoot em up” game. The sprint starts with the sprint planning and ends with the sprint review meeting. It usually takes around 1 hour for one meeting. The assets which we could not finish during the sprint, they go the next sprint. To prevent these kind of problems, we have daily stand up meetings. They are short meetings and its purpose is for each member to share what they have done, what they going to do, and what kind of problems they have faced. For example, our programmer shared that he had troubles to make a harpoon work and at the same day I found him a person who could help, and they fixed the problem. So, in my opinion daily meetings are good and very useful. It is really much easier to work with the backlog than a big planning document in traditional project management. Scrum does not require detail planning for a whole project and it gives more flexibility. Our team is happy with a new project approach and it seems to be working well for us. We deliver the most of assets at the end of the sprint and we have been done with Alpha features before Alpha presentation. I am, as a project manager, quite happy with our team work and scrum. I this it affected our work and the game in a positive way. Now all we have to do is prepare for the Beta presentation, which hopefully will go well and we will be done with the Beta features.  |