SCRUM
|
This week our assignment is to write a blog post about how Scrum has affected the development of our game. I’m sure most of the readers of this blog are already familiar with Scrum however to be thorough, I will first briefly explain the basics and then explain how Scrum has been implemented by our group. Specifically, I will write about all the meetings associated with Sprints which I will soon explain in more detail. Scrum is an agile framework meant to help developers maximize efficiency by reducing waste and creating predictability of how the development will proceed. It is an iterative framework where every task that needs to be done is planned beforehand by evaluating the risk, estimating how many work hours will need to put down, and distributing tasks to the different members of the team. All of these aspects are then documented in a backlog, in our case it’s a google document we refer to as our Scrum doc. This planning is done during a ”Sprint planning meeting” and then executed during a ”Sprint”, the Sprint is then followed up by a ”Sprint review meeting”. During the Sprint review you are supposed to evaluate the Sprint and check off what has been completed from the backlog, and how far the progress has come with the uncompleted tasks. In addition to this, you are supposed to hold a ”Sprint retrospective meeting” where you identify which practices has been ineffective and come up with solutions accordingly. This is very important since one of the key elements of Scrum and Agile is to react to changes in contrast to sticking to a plan at all costs. So called ”Stand up meetings” are also held every day (about 10-15 minutes) in order to keep the team updated on the progress of the different tasks. In our case, we hold a Sprint planning meeting every Monday, followed up by a 5 day long Sprint, and then finally conclude the Sprint on Fridays by holding a Sprint review meeting. This particular framework was assigned to us and is true for every group. I believe some groups have been more successful with keeping to the Scrum framework where some have been having more difficulties. To be honest, I don’t feel like my group has been able to implement the Scrum framework as well as I had hoped. Although my group has been consistent in holding Sprint planning, and review meetings every week, when it comes to the daily stand up meeting we have experienced some problems. In the beginning, we decided that the stand up meetings should be held at the same time every day of the week. It seemed simple enough to put into practice however almost immediately meetings ended up being canceled because members of the team who had class later or earlier in the day, or simply not at all didn’t want to go all the way to school for the purpose of such a short meeting. In one member’s case, it takes an hour of traveling to get to school and back so it makes sense to be hesitant to attend these meetings. Although I can understand this point of view, unfortunately this hesitancy was often expressed earlier the same day of the meeting and therefore meetings ended up simply being canceled instead of rescheduled. Another problem was that in the beginning no rooms were booked for the purpose of the meetings. In some cases this was true for our Sprint planning and review meetings as well. This resulted in a lot of time wasted on finding a free, preferably secluded spot to hold our meetings on, and if these conditions were not met, I personally felt that it had an impact on the quality of the meetings. Lastly, and I am personally very guilty of this, some team members (on some occasions all members) have difficulties with being on time. This also impacts the meetings since frustration is built up if the team has to wait on members who are running late. If the team choose not to wait however, the late participant has to be briefed about things brought up early in the meeting, which is a waste of time and also a cause of frustration. Personally, this affected me by giving me anxiety. I am not sure if it actually had an impact on my work, but either way it stressed me out a lot and since I am very uncomfortable with confrontation I did not feel like I could easily express these feelings with my team. I DID bring it up but maybe not in a well-phrased, constructive way. I believe the rest of my team had similar frustrations. We tried to deal with it by scheduling our daily stand up meetings on discord (an app similar to Slack where you can hold voice calls), however not all team members seemed to be in on this idea and we were not able to implement this until yesterday even though it was brought up from week one. I believe some of our team members, including me, were more comfortable and motivated by personal meetings, but since I have the privilege of living very close to school I also felt that I should be able to compromise. Recently, our project manager has been doing a good job of booking rooms every day and holding the meetings at the same time regardless of who shows up. We have also kept up a habit of keeping the room booked so that those who want can work there after the meeting is over. This has helped improving the consistency and quality of our meetings, as well as my personal efficiency since I am prone to procrastinating if I stay at home and work. However, I believe there is still room for improvement in this area. For example, communicating the scheduled meetings to the rest of the team on Slack, even though it’s been mentioned vocally already, and to mention it on time instead of one or few hours before said meeting is taking place. Showing up to the meetings on time (again, I’m very guilty in this area) is also something that still needs work. Finally, I want to mention that we have not implemented any Sprint retrospective meetings what so ever. I did not even really know about their existence until today (forgive me!) or at least I had forgotten about them, but I feel they would have been very helpful to us. For example, the problems we experienced with the meetings could have been brought up earlier and in a more official manner so that we could come up with and try out solutions quickly and improve our efficiency. All in all I think Scrum, if implemented correctly, is a very useful tool and I want to underline that our errors are to be expected considering the fact that we are students trying out this framework for the first time. Sorry about the long post!
 |
