3. Scrum
What?We have used scrum, a method used for development of a product, for some weeks now and are getting more and more used to it every week. It have been very useful for planning weeks ahead and for giving us an understanding what needs to be done for making the game. It also give us an understanding on what we should prioritise next in the process as well as what the other in the team are doing. How?The first week of our project we got introduced to scrum via our project manager. To start everything up we had to do the product backlog for our Scrum document. To explain it further we made a long list consisting of all features needed for the game and after that write down every single thing needed to be done for the making of every specific feature. What code was needed? What animation and art was needed? What sound was needed? To make it even easier every category had different color schemes together with different colors for what priority the making of that artefact had. Since this was a new way of planning for all of us we had some minor problems with the method. It was however something we could learn from and remember to do different in the future. What happened was that the first day of one week our project manager was ill and could not help us do the weekly sprint planning. He however managed to get a project manager from second year to help us instead. The problem was that he did not have that much of an insight of our progress and work together with the fact that we were unsure if we would even have a meeting at all that day. That week’s sprint planning had some issues, for example we forgot to fill in the estimated time of all the things that we should do that week and some things we planned for were not written down. The reason for it to be totally forgotten was that we told the stand-in manager that we wanted to do the rest with our ordinary project manager on the meeting the day after. What we learned from this was that it is best to fill in everything at the sprint meeting or it will be forgotten and maybe not even done at all. Why?We have been using the Scrum method to make it clear what we are suppose to do every week and what to prioritize first. It has also helped us understand what the other people in the group are doing and the daily sprint meetings makes it clear in what direction the project is going. I personally think the method is a good method for the planning of group projects and I do not have anything bad to say about it.  |