Agileception
|
Scrum, or any flavor of agile development is a good tool for structuring work. But depending on the environment and tool it can vary from good to outright awful. I have experience working professionally as a software developer on large projects. When working several months or years on a larger project where you have to adapt to changes from customers, it’s a must have, to be able to keep track of rapid changes and still keeping on track. When working professionally the sprint week begins at exactly 8:00 Am, and then you have eight hours every day, to work on it. But in a school environment, where there are lectures now and then, that also varies from member to member in the group, it gets a bit hard too keep to the structure. This has made the workflow a bit jittery since some days little to no work at all can be done. It can’t really be avoided, but it’s a bit frustrating non the less. Being able to rapidly change and work smoothly with scrum, the tools used is essential. Having an online excel sheet as a scrum tool is an absolute disaster. Its clunky, hard to get an overview and when tasks need to be updated or split into smaller pieces, you have to do it at several places! This caused a lot of frustration and makes the process less than agile… Still, I understand that this method was chosen for ease of examination for the school but… Such a bother… Before we began on this weeks sprint we copied the items still left in the backlog into a proper tool (Although a bit basic), Trello. Working in Trello gives a better overview of what every one is working on, and makes changes easier. And when the week is done we only need to update the excel sheet once, for examination purposes. This workflow is a lot smoother and reduces frustration, which in turn increases work morale. So i guess my experience working on this have been a bit bumpy. But i guess you just have to take it to the next level by being agile when attempt work with agile. |