Scrum-ing the project
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Hi, writing about scrum from a perspective of a first year management student, who will learn about scrum in the second year of study, sounds a little awkward. The more funny thing about it is, that a literature for a scrum has been given to us by game design course and not by management with agile methods course. However, we started our shoot ’em up game project in full scrum way. What is scrum? It is one of the agile approaches to management, which characterise an iterative way of developing the product. What does iterative mean? It means that a product is built piece by piece in short two-four weeks intervals called – sprints. After each piece (increment) of a product, a developing team focuses on the next one and so on and so forth. Kick-off Before the start of our project, we had one week to prepare for it. We had had a kick-off meeting on which we have decided about team’s roles and responsibilities, potential blockers and risks, a definition of done and a sprint plan. We had been given the requirements from our course directors. Those requirements made our user stories backlog. From them, we have developed features which we have put in our product backlog. Those features will be our increments to work on during our project, sprint by sprint. Each feature being prioritised by MoSCoW system meaning Must have, Should have, Could have and Won’t have in a particular sprint. Sprint planning At the kick-off meeting, we have decided to have a sprint planning meeting every Monday. It is where we decide our sprint goal for current week as well as features we will be working on. Daily stand up meetings Twelve minutes of a standing meeting where we shortly brief what have each of us done the previous day, what are we going to do the current day and what were the obstacles or problems if any. This way we were up to date with problems if they occurred. Sprint review At the beginning of our project we had a sprint review meetings on Fridays, but lately, we have pushed them to Mondays, because of our schedule and lectures on Fridays. The bad side of it is, that Mondays have become fully occupied and long and exhausting. The good side is that we have a flow of testing the previous sprint results, discuss them and based on them set the goal and plan for current sprint, do the sprint retrospective and in the end, the sprint planning. After that, we are done for the day. Satisfaction I feel that working in scrum have good sides such as keeping the flow or the progress easily, working in groups (we have dedicated every Wednesday to work together), being motivated by the results that are visible and so on and so forth. One of the bad sides of scrum we practise on this course is a length or duration of the sprint, which is only one week long. Having lectures and assignments apart from it were obstacles, which evidently slowed us down. But, that has changed from this week and hopefully, we will manage to meet our Beta requirements. But, that is another topic for another blog. Stay well and catch you next blog.
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