Thoughts on Scrum, and the troubles of individuals meeting up in person.

So, this will be a short one.

I don’t really have all too much to say about the SCRUM process, somewhat because I don’t really understand all parts of it as well as I could, and parts because we don’t really do it in the traditional way in our group.

We had our daily stand-ups in person the first week, but afterwards we figured that to avoid the hassle of having to book a room in the library to do them in for such a short amount of time, in a week where we had little to no lectures together, we would have them on the voice-chat/chat service Discord – where most of our communication occurs anyway. I really looked forward to this, personally. And for the first couple of days it went well, everyone reported on their progress and hardships each day, and things went according to plan – if a bit delayed, which appears customary for our group. It’s fine though, almost everyone in our group is bad at doing stuff on time, and it’s mostly to ensure good quality, so I don’t mind too much, personally.
By the, I think, third week – however, things started going slightly awry. Some people would forget to report on their progress that day, which led to some frustration with our project manager. As he’s calm a cucumber, most of the time, I figured that I at least had to do it properly, for him to at least retain his sanity somewhat. I begun being more descriptive, posting progress images and the like, and it seemed like it eased some of the stress of the entire group.

We also had one of our sprint reviews/planning via Discord, and except for someone sleeping in a bit longer than desired, it went very well – better than the ones we had in-person, in fact. Well, at least in my opinion.

Usually, most members of our group are quite reclusive. We enjoy working on our individual tasks, well, individually. I do, as well. I don’t mind meeting up and doing it on-site, but if I could choose, I would choose the comfort of my own living-space. It works well for me, most of the time – but you also have to consider the other parts of the group. If me being there to support the team is something that is desired, I will of course do that happily. However, it does seem like most of our teammates likes working on their own.

Despite some quite hefty delays in the first two weeks of our develpement, I feel that most of our team has settled into their respective roles now – and hopefully will catch up with the tasks in the backlog that needs to be completed.

I will try to push for some more occasions to check up on our general progress with the game, however – as I would like more input in the actual gameplay of the game, together with our programmer. The last week was quite satisfactory, though – at least work-wise, and I hope we’ll have something good to show in time for the beta.

In general, SCRUM helped our group to visualise what assets were complete, and which ones that are not. It also made us more aware of eachother’s workload – which makes it easier to balance the things you do so that you can help the programmer out and vise versa. Even though we didn’t stick to the daily standup structure of meetings, I found that the way you add items to your backlog etc had a positive effect on our project.

Thanks for reading!

Felix Rahm