Scrum and Sirens
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The focus of this post is to reflect and consider how Scrum as an Agile a framework has affected the development process of this project, and how has it affected my personal workflow.
As objective as one can be, Scrum is in theory a great framework to work by. Increasing collaboration between team members, adapting and updating the product when new information is considered, identifying obstacles, iterative production, etc. In practice, however, applying Scrum is not as easy as it seems. Personally, I’ve always been the kind of person that makes intensive hours from Monday to Wednesday to have the rest of the week off, and make the most of the motivation and impulse of the first half of the week. In that sense, the sprint planning changed my workflow for better and compelled me to distribute my work throughout the week in more achievable goals and reducing the risk of burnout. Keeping track of tasks is essential to this framework, which is why we considered using Trello boards as a fast and practical way to do it. Unfortunately, filling the spreadsheet as a requirement meant a great deal of time would go into using two ways of communication and tracking. Spreading the information didn’t seem very practical at the time. The way that is made, in addition, is not very useful for keeping track of your own work or the daily progress of other team members. I see now that many teams are using Trello with no issues whatsoever, so we’ll probably reconsider for the next project. Standup meetings also had a great influence in my workflow. The ideal situation for the stand up meetings to work properly is in an office environment where you will encounter your group members every working day in a consistent schedule. Unfortunately for us, given our different schedules and working hours, it has been rather difficult to hold the daily meetings in a beneficial way. In our case, lunch hour is the best hour as we’re usually nearby. No-lectures days, on the other hand, are the most difficult for me. It completely breaks the workflow having to move about for a 10 mnts meeting, in the middle of the day. It usually ends up being at least 40mnts (counting the trip to and from the meeting place), which defeats the purpose of a stand up. By the time you get home, getting into whatever you were doing again might prove very tedious. Despite this, alternative solutions have proven even more time consuming, like online meetings. It’s too easy to spend more than 40 mnts waiting for everyone to appear. A good thing about the stand up meetings is that most groups feel more compelled to deliver when you have to see each other face to face every day. The idea of adapting to change, feedback, testing results, obstacles, etc, is vital. I didn’t really know how important it was doing it consciously, and it has certainly improved my way of doing things. Again, artists trying to make a final asset from day one, I was one of them (still difficult to resist, though). However, I think “embracing change” doesn’t mean loosing focus, adding new features every week or changing the already existing-untested ones. We’re working on it. In conclusion, Scrum has helped with our workflow/workloads and collaboration considerably, and although our situation is not ideal (nor bad), it would be remarkably worse without Scrum. We can see the contrast between the development of our concept document and this project. Featured Image Source here.
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