Scrum in Archon

Working with scrum has been useful to plan out workflow but difficult because the team fails at the execution. While we were all given some prior knowledge of what scrum entails, nobody in the group has had any  practical experience with it before. The team has done a great job of planning and distributing work for each sprint and everyone (almost always) actively attends the daily stand-up meetings. The issues come with gauging work hours needed compared to actual work hours used, leading to work being incomplete after each sprint.

Scrum has been useful when it comes to keeping our work planned and organized, which has seen a drastic improvement compared to our previous project. Thanks to scrum we all have a much clearer picture of what need to be done and when.

A snippet of the sprint reviews, where as can be seen the work is clearly divided and planned well, but mostly not completed.

As i mentioned, the biggest issue we have in the team is work not being completed on time in accordance with the sprint planning. To rectify this we have taken steps from the course literature book “Agile game development with Scrum” by Clinton Keith. The first is to push work from the previous sprint into the next one based on a priority of importance. This of course means that coming work needs to be pushed to make room for the previous week’s leftovers. This has lead to us having to cut down on planned features by re-evaluating what is important and crucial to the core of the game. And lastly, if we decide that there are not enough things we can cut to make time, the last resort is working overtime. As this overtime usually means working on the weekend we decided to make it 100% optional to not put any unnecessary stress on any of our team members.

The upside is that we have seen a steady increase of completed items each subsequent sprint review. Learning from the mistakes of the previous sprint and becoming better at estimating the required hours to complete tasks. So although the team has a few issues following scrum properly, I think it has been a positive benefit to the project overall.