Agile Programming
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Welcome back honored blog-reader, Fredrik here again, and today I will discuss Scrum and how it has affected my personal workflow throughout this project. First off I would like to talk about the bad parts. For instance, the fact that there are now multiple additional obstacles in the way of me sitting down and actually coding. Which as a fairly lazy person is definitely a huge problem. Not only do I have to make a new task within HacknPlan (the Kanban board our group uses), I also have to start recording the time I use to study as well as to remember to redo it when I switch to another task.
 In addition to this, I now constantly have to think about what I am working on. Before when I worked alone on projects in programming I always just did whatever I felt inspired to work on at that very moment. Of course, this has upsides, it’s probably even predominantly positive. Mainly because I usually get lost in my own code and forget what I should be working on because I see some shiny problem in the corner of my eye that I just have to hack away at. However, it is still something that I have to get used to and I’m still prone to going off-book when I’m short on time and patience and neglecting my responsibilities to follow the proper order. Even if I have my minor gripes with Scrum and agile development I still think that it has been immensely beneficial to me and my team. The reason for this is mainly because of the improvement to our communication, something that in my opinion should be valued over everything else when it comes to game development. I say this because that there are so many different aspects to a game that needs to be thought about and that need to fit together perfectly to work. Not to mention that they are being made by people who most definitively have completely different workflow in addition to the normal personality clashes that are to be expected.
Because of having to do daily-standups, sprint-planning, and sprint-reviews you are constantly coaxed to talk about the game and how best to proceed with it which not only clears up misunderstandings, it also helps the different disciplines to understand each other and what they require to be effective. In conclusion, I do have a lot of bad things to say about Scrum, but most of them are because I have still not gotten completely used to it, but even now the pros far outway the cons.
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