Dev Blog 3, Working With Scrum
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In this week’s blog post I will be writing about my experience working with the agile framework Scrum and how it has affected our development. The most basic explanation of what Scrum is that I can give would be: divide all work to be done into small work items (artefacts), each week (each sprint) pick the items that you’re going to work on. Having this clear structure to help choose what you’re going to work on made sense to me right away when we started working with it for the development of our game. Since we worked in the same group to create a design document last semester, I can compare what it’s like working with Scrum against how it was to work without any framework. When we didn’t have a framework, it would often be hard to divide work between group members in a meaningful way. We would often have to do most of the work in meetings, with one or two people actually doing something while others providing their input. Since it wasn’t clear what you were trying to achieve with what you worked on, it being just one part of the whole, and without any clear definitions of what you were creating, it meant that you needed the other group members around to ask for their input. While we successfully created our product working like this, it seemed to me that it was very inefficient and time consuming. With Scrum, this changed completely. Since all the work is divided into small pieces, which are all clearly defined as to what they aim accomplish, this meant that you could work completely independently without any problems. Of course, we still want to consistently update each other on what we’re doing, and the daily stand up meetings serve this purpose well. Another positive aspect of working with Scrum is that it is also helpful to me personally. Usually I am very unstructured in my work. With Scrums backlog of work items and the requirement that you keep record of how you long you spent on each of them, I have been able to be more consistent in how I work. This is also something that the daily stand up meeting helps with, since you’re reporting on your work done every day, it motivates you to actually get something done that you can report. In conclusion, working with Scrum has been greatly beneficial to me and my team in being as efficient as possible while creating our game.
Visual Studio Team Services, which we have been using for version control and for keeping track of work items. |
