How scrum impacted our development process.
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During our time of developing “Aetherial” we barely have any of our regular lectures. For me this poorly structured week can have negative consequences on my productivity. Scrum has made it easier for us to structure our work week and the daily stand up meetings help us to keep our head in the game and focused on what we have to do. It also greatly improves group communications, as problems with different aspects of the game will surface sooner. This allows us to react dynamically to issues with our game mid development cycle, even mid sprint. Besides the daily stand up meetings we also had frequent design meetings, which are supposed to ensure that every team member is always on the same page regarding the design of our game. Even though we did end up having some misunderstandings about certain design aspects, we managed to resolve those and avoid more due to our frequent meetings. Another great aspect of scrum is that it allows us to deal with absent team members in a way that allows them to still take part in the development process, while it allows the rest of the group to plan their schedule around that persons absence. Another example of this aspect being useful is when dealing with sickness; We had a lot of people miss stand ups and other meetings due to sickness, but because we still communicate on a daily basis we still manage to be productive. The course plan has us take lectures in other courses during the time we are developing our shoot em up game and this can be quite stressful to have to worry about additional assignments and subjects while working on the game. However scrum allows us to plan our sprints in a way that gives us time during the weekend to catch up on our other subjects, that we might not have that much time to study for during the week days. Overall I think Scrum has helped us tremendously with our development process, not just when it comes to managing our timetable, but also when it comes to communicating design ideas. Communication in general was greatly improved by using that framework and the user stories have helped us formulate our ideas in a understandable way.  |