5SD064 – Blog Post 3 : Scrum
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This post will be about how Scrum has influenced the development of Team Troll’s game, Depth, from the programmer’s perspective. Let us start with the good parts. Scrum has been quite effective when it comes to facilitating group communication. Stand-up meetings are a great way of clearly and concisely sharing the what, when and why of each team member’s work, and provides a way of adjusting workload and work items in a way which is reactive to small changes. For example, since I could see what the others needed from me / had difficulty with during the stand-up, I could propose adjustments to what I was doing that day right there and then. Scrum has also been great for its iterative production cycle ; I was able to get quick feedback for my code, for example, since we could react to our finished product at the end of each sprint and find out whether things worked or not.
Sprint recap for our second sprint. The bad parts, however, should also be considered. Daily stand-up meetings would work for a company setting, however they are a huge hassle for students who each have their own schedule. Indeed, we would need to get together either very early or very late, which are the times when we are the least productive and awake. Our solution to this was to have the meetings over Discord, a voice-chat service, at 5pm most days. This means that we don’t all need to go to university every day. This doesn’t fix the fact that at 5pm, most of us are tired and don’t want to work. Since we are making so many adjustments to the game, it means that there are many artifacts we aren’t writing in in the backlog. It is also extremely hard to estimate work-hours ; how many work-hours does implementing light take? Well, I don’t know how to implement lights in unity, so hey, let’s say 10. It turns out it took an hour. Guess I’ll add more stuff to my sprint plan. Overall, Scrum seems to be a good tool. However, it seems like it works best in a corporate, professional environment. In our case though, it is quite a hassle sometimes and creates some frustration when we have to follow the scrum method to a T.  |
