The Beginning of the End
As the title suggests, my group is not using user stories. The reason for this horrendous act can be summed up in two parts.
First of all, the user stories that I had been given from my fellow designer were lackluster (I have no ill will towards you, it was everyone’s first attempt at user stories). The amount of stories were poor, they did not cover the entire concept document and the parts that were supposedly covered felt like they were missing critical user stories that would have helped when designing.
But Daniel, why did you not just write the missing user stories yourself?
Excellent question myself, the second part of the horrendous act consists of a few factors as to why I did not write them myself.
The first reason was that I had been asked to write the backlog for the project by one of my programmers. Why did I listen to my programmer regarding a design decision?
Good question once again myself, for you see the answer to that question is that in my infinite (read very limited) wisdom, and confusion regarding the scrum sheet assignment, I made the decision to write out all the features in the backlog, just to be on the safe side. A big mistake, as it turns out, because it has lead to a few issues.
The confusion regarding the scrum sheet assignment can best be summed up in four words:
-A clash of frameworks.
As my fellow students might be aware of at this point, and if you have read my last post, is that the project is meant to be worked on using the agile scrum framework, but the way the course is set up makes it lean more towards the waterfall method (if you are curious as to how, please read my last post and if you are still confused after that, leave a comment).
The final and probably most influential reason as to why it turned out like this would be that I was, and still am, a procrastinator. I can complete assignments to save my life, it is not that bad, but it is not exactly helpful in any way, shape or form.
How the Cookie Has Crumbled So Far
While I would not say that our project is a disaster, it is far from it in my opinion, I would be lying if I said that it has been smooth sailing. The worst part about not using user stories is probably that the discussion part of it seeps into other parts of our meetings, side-tracking them and making them unnecessarily long. When there are no clear cut place and time for design discussions, the features that we work on are open for interpretation which causes confusion when two different ideas of the same feature clash.
Supposedly, I am the product owner, or at least I have been told so by my design teacher, Adam Mayes. That is however not what the project managers have been told, according to them the course responsible is the product owner, which does not make any sense to me whatsoever. A product owner is supposed to attend every meeting, a course responsible cannot do that, it is physically impossible for them to attend every groups’ meetings.
This clash of information created confusion but more importantly, I feel like I have less control over the project because of it. Not to mention that when I do not use user stories I cannot direct my group members with set paths, they make their own paths according to their understanding of the feature, which leads me to another annoyance.
Why are there leads in this project?! No scrum environment has leads, there are Product Owners, Scrum masters, and Team Members, no more, no less, so why were we told that we should assign leads to our team members?
Learn from the Past, Focus On the Future
This post got a bit ranty I have to say and I apologize for that, but to round it all up, here are some reflections on my situation.
Firstly, since we do not work 100% according to scrum and user stories, we are missing out on crucial experience, I would say that I am the one who misses out the most.
Just as the header suggests however, I have learned from my mistakes and the next project I work on will be better because of those mistakes, hindsight is 20/20 after all.
About Daniel Reinsson
2017 Game Design
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