Working with Scrum
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This week I am going to talk about how the scrum development framework has affected the development process of our game. Scrum is a development framework that is based on the agile manifesto which has a few core values and principles such as adjusting to change rather than following a concrete plan, and valuing the individual team members and the interaction between them over the working processes or the tools used as mentioned in the course book “Agile Game Development with Scrum” by Clinton Keith.
Overall I think scrum has really helped in speeding up and making the development process of our game more efficient and fun. The scrum documentation helped me personally as a programmer break down all the assets in our game which helped me plan ahead when it comes to how these different assets would interact with each other in future iterations, as well as what I could reuse when it comes to code. Also the daily stand-up meetings as well as the sprint reviews acted a as a motivator for me because it’s always great to see the progress you have made and know that your teammates are putting as much effort as you are. Despite all its positives, I feel like scrum, especially in the later phases of development, has slowed the development process down, and felt inconvenient to me personally. For example, for code we finished most of the what was needed for the entire game by the alpha phase, and that is because the code needed was relatively simple, my fellow coder and I have both either worked with unity before or prepared really well to work with it, and because as lead code I wanted clean code from the start and no placeholders, because we had enough time to do that. But if you move forward to the present, the pre-beta stage, we do not have much left to do, both because we have finished most of the items in the scrum backlog and because we have to wait on the artists and the team members responsible for sound to hand in the assets they are working on. I think that the scale of the project has more to do with this than scrum does, but what scrum did was either make you underestimate how much work you had to do in each sprint, for example, you think the work you were assigned is enough to cover the hours you had to work, but you end up finishing early, so you either do more work or ask to be assigned more work in the next sprint and end up with less to do later on, which is the case for the coders in my team, or overestimate it, by giving yourself less work to do early on or spending more time than what was needed on a specific item from the backlog, and then in later sprints you will have more work to do which might cause delays or leave other team members with less/nothing to do.  |
