Scrum – Yay or nay?

Scrum?

I’ll try and be quick with this.
Scrum is a work framework that emphasizes iterative development and being agile. It’s made for small teams, but can be scaled up. Development is divided into sprints, in our case these last one week, but should preferably be a bit longer, two weeks is apparently common. At the start of a sprint there is a sprint planning where the team members discuss and pick the tasks they’ll be working on during the sprint, and estimates for the different tasks are discussed. At the end of the sprint there is a sprint review where the team goes over what was completed and what was not, and also what went well and what could be improved. Also, every work day during a sprint a stand-up is held, these are short 10-15 minute meetings where every member goes over what they have done since the last stand-up, and also what they need for their work that day. At the end of a every sprint you want a minimum viable product(MVP), instead of assembling it piece by piece. This allows for easier testing during development.

All this allows the members to tailor the workload for each member with tasks they are motivated for, ideally. The face to face communication allows for problems to be quickly discovered and addressed.

For us?

It’s been working well for us in terms of development. We’ve tried to implement things as fast as possible in order to test them quickly, and then polish or redo. This falls well in line with scrums iterative style, and trying to have a MVP at the end of every sprint.
As for communication, that is something we struggled with especially at the the start, but has improved over the project, and still is. This makes it easy for our artist to request assets implemented to see them tested, for me to request assets, and the designer ask for features tested.

All in all..

I like scrum, and think it definitely has been a positive for the team , and also for me as an individual. In general I am much more motivated for the work I’m doing since I have choice in what I’m working on (mostly). But this is where scrum might go wrong for some, it relies heavily on the individual, and gives a lot of freedom, which can be abused. For our team though it has worked well.
That’s it for me, thanks for reading!
Next week I’ll hopefully be back with more fishies or something.

My comment on other blog

https://thecodingspartan.wordpress.com/2018/02/22/agile-ish-game-development-w-scrum/comment-page-1/#comment-7

Wiktor here, my turn to comment on your blog!

Enjoyed your introduction to scrum, it was quick, concise, and presented the important bits, even included some of its origins. Your previous management background shows in the things you write about here, and I enjoyed this since it differs from what I wrote about and what I’ve seen from others. I also like your use of pictures here, using them for explaining instead of writing everything out.

As for how it has affected your group you raised fair points, both positive and negative. If I was to critique something, it would be to give examples of how it has “… helped straighten out the production pipeline…”, but as I said earlier, I like how you’ve kept it short, so this might have ruined that aspect of it.

All in all, nice post, and keep up the good work!

Best regards,
Wiktor Ravndal

About Wiktor Ravndal

2017 Programming

View all posts by Wiktor Ravndal →