Agile Method – Scrum
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The development method we were told to use is the agile framework scrum. This framework is used to break down the development into small tasks, listing them into a priority list called backlog. The difficulty of the tasks should be adequate to be completed within a certain amount of time, these are usually weeks in form of iterations and is called sprint. Within these iterations the group has daily meetings, called stand-up meetings, to keep track of what each member has done, what they are doing, and what they are going to do next. At the end of each iteration the groups have a final meeting to wrap up the tasks, re-organize the tasks, and plan for the next coming iteration. Within the group there is a roll called ScrumMaster. The ScrumMaster is responsible for helping the team to stay focused on the tasks of the current iteration and prevent obstacles during an iteration. Even if the roll of ScrumMaster might sound like a higher “ranked” roll, in the scrum methodology everyone is equal and the ScrumMaster has no higher rights than others. As I initially mentioned, we are using this method to development the game Umibozu and so far everything is going great. We have accomplished most of our sprint goals every iteration and the development is going quite smoothly. This has also keep us on track with our hand-in assignments and the requirements for the Alpha version of our game. In my opinion, we have been able to accomplish our sprint goals and it has gone somewhat smoothly for us, because we have followed the Scrum framework quite well. The only thing that is lacking from some of us, including me, is the daily stand-up meetings. Instead of having an actual meeting every day we decided in the beginning to instead report in the stand-up daily with a message on Slack, a provider of team collaboration tools and services, because we concluded that having to meet in the university or at someone’s place would take unnecessary time from us, especially as everyone lives far from each other. The negative part is that some of us forget to report the daily stand-up from time to time, affecting the working process by having the group not knowing how that particular are is progressing until the sprint review meeting. A solution to this could be as easily as reminding everyone to do it by sending a message or in other cases telling that particular person to report in the daily stand-up. In an ideal scrum environment, this is a task for the ScumMaster to resolve. /Teddy Chavez A.  |