DawnBringer3D Tips & Tricks, Personal News, Game Development

Cargo Cult Scrum

After my post Scrum My Day! I received some feedback about using Scrum. Clinton Keith pointed out that our team wasn’t using it right. After that I’v been doing loads of reading and researching about Scrum. I’v been only using Scrum for two months so I can’t yet say I have seen how it really works, but at least I’v seen how it doesn’t work.

Real problems :

• Daily Meeting
  • We were only saying what we are going to do and updated our task properties.
• Not having a sprint ‘post mortems’ – Sprint Retrospectives
  • To discuss about what we did right and what we didn’t do right. Enables us to improve things for the next sprint.

So now after I’m a bit wiser I can say how the daily meeting should go :

• Everybody tells :
  • What they did yesterday.
  • What they are going to do today.
  • What is preventing them from doing something.
• Point is not to give a report to single person, instead give an overview of what are you doing and what are your problems to your team so that they can react to it.

Also use iterations (time boxes) so that you get good enough result. That way you are able to control time usage instead of trying to do everything perfect, which would take too much time in most of the cases.