22-02-2018
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It’s that time of the week again, loyal followers! This week everyone is expected to write about their experience with Scrum and yours truly is no exception. Now, where to start? I guess it’s appropriate to start with my initial reaction to Scrum, which was… sceptical, to say the least. I’ve always expected these ”workflow enhancers” and whatnot to be a huge waste of time.I know it may sound narrow-minded but from personal experience they never live up to the hype, nobody wants them and they actually cause more harm than good. Why not put just the extra hours you spend on keeping everything up to par with some weird ruleset on, I don’t know, actually doing the work you’re supposed to do? As you can clearly see, I wasn’t the most hopeful guy that all this would work out. But hey, I thought, It’s part of the education and it won’t get better just because I complain a whole bunch about it. So I went to the meetings, set up the backlog, made my first sprint plan and come Friday, sprint evaluation day, and big shocker: I hadn’t even done half. I had fallen into the classic newbie trap of underestimate work time. No problem, said my project manager, we’ll just move the stuff that didn’t get done to next weeks sprint. Hopefully you can understand my confusion at this point. What was the point of all this if we didn’t even have to do the things we set out to do? It all just seemed like grandstanding to me. Nevertheless, I made a new sprint plan for next week, this time taking into account my previous failures. And lo and behold: I followed through! Now that’s what I call personal development. And the daily stand up meetings had started to make sense. It was actually super productive to feel up to speed with everyone in the group. It was less four individuals working on different parts and more a team. Now writing that sentence I actually surprised myself by how accurate it sounds. Scrum has gone from a time-wasting annoyance to an actual helper. With this I’ve learned at least one thing: time wasted planning isn’t wasted at all if it’s actually helpful. I still reserve my right to be sceptical towards new work methods though.
P.S: Unity Collab can die in a fire.  |