Project management 4. Scrum

Project management 4. Scrum

What is Scrum?

  • Scrum is a framework for delivering products (usually software)
  • Designed for teams of ten or fewer members
  • Scrum Values
    • Minimal chance of failure: product is worked on in small increments
    • Transparency: changes are visible to the team
  • Work is split to Sprints: goals that can be completed within time-constrained iterations
    • Sprints are most commonly two weeks long (for us, shorter)
    • Progress is tracked and re-planned in Dailies, 15-minute time-boxed meetings

Why Scrum for game development?

  • Through its practices and principles, Scrum creates conditions to achieve good results
  • Scrum gives agency to team members: meeting the goal is a team effort
  • Scrum creates transparency: problems get addressed early
  • Scrum isn’t magic: you need to continuously enforce its practices in action
  • Scrum facilitates communication, but doesn’t solve any problems for you!
  • Cross-discipline teams: Enables teams to deliver features and mechanics that have clear value
  • Self-management: Enables teams to select the amount of work they can commit to every sprint and complete that work through whatever means they find appropriate
  • Self-organization: Enables teams to have a degree of authority and responsibility to select their membership

Scrum basics

Scrum people

Dev team

  • Small team that aims to deliver a product
  • Organizes itself and its work
  • Collaborates with Product owner
  • Creates product increments in a series of sprints

Scrum master

  • Helps to facilitate usage of Scrum to the team
  • Ensures the Scrum framework is followed
  • Aims to improve team’s workflow
    • Basically an acting producer!
  • Can be a part of the dev team (a “peer leader”)
    • …but should not be the product owner
  • Can be a different person every Sprint

Product owner

  • Accountable for profit & loss
  • Listens to the client’s wishes
  • Manages the Product Backlog
  • Representation of stakeholders and clients to the Dev Team
  • Chooses what to release - and when

The rest

  • Stakeholders (not actually part of the team)
    • People outside the Scrum team who have an interest in the product
    • Sales, marketing, end customers, etc
  • Client
    • Monitors product backlog
    • Is responsible for the upkeep of the product backlog

Backlogs

Product backlog

  • Holds the requirements for the product
  • Managed by the Product Owner
  • Composed of tasks
    • unit of deliverable work
    • well-defined completeness
    • completable during a single Sprint
    • Features, Bugfixes, Content…

Sprint backlog

  • A list of tasks to be completed during the Sprint
  • Selected from the Product backlog
  • A forecast of what is aimed to be done during the Sprint, not a promise!!!

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Definition of Done

  • When is a task considered done?
  • This is decided by the Dev team in Sprint Retrospective (“Retro”)
  • Can change as project progresses * “It works” -> “It passes tests”

Sprint Events

  • First day: Sprint Planning
  • Every day: Daily Scrum
  • Last day: Sprint Review & Sprint Retrospective

Sprint planning

  • Starts a new Sprint
  • The whole Scrum team attends
    • inspects the whole Product Backlog
  • A Sprint Goal is created and dissected into a new Sprint Backlog
    • The Sprint Goal is immutable
    • The exact implementations are not discussed
      • those are rather left for the Dev Team to decide
  • New tasks are given to the Dev Team

Daily Scrum (“Daily”)

  • Only Dev Team attends, with these goals:
    • Inspect the progression towards the Sprint Goal
    • Inspect how the Sprint Backlog is clearing out
    • Create a plan for the next 24 hours
  • Max. 15 min long!
  • Keeps everyone on the same page
    • $\Rightarrow$ Optimizes collaboration and performance of the Dev Team
  • Example topics to address in a Daily:
    • What have you achieved since the last Daily?
    • What problems have you faced?
    • How does the team address problems?
    • Is there need for (re)allocation of tasks?

Sprint review

  • Attended by the Scrum team and stakeholders
  • Goal: Offer feedback and open up discussions about the Sprint
  • Starts off with a feature demonstration
  • Product Owner presents the state of the Product Backlog
    • What is releasable?
  • Dev Team tells what happened during the Sprint
    • How different problems were addressed?
    • What was their effect?
  • Everybody provides and listens for feedback

Sprint retrospective (“Retro”)

  • After every Sprint Review
  • Only the Scrum team attends
    • worries and thoughts are brought up
  • Possible discussion topics
    • What went right?
    • What should be improved?
    • Tools needed and used?
    • The suitability of the Scrum process.
    • What does Done mean, and should it be redefined?

Scrum master tasks

  • Continuously:
    1. Make sure the task board on GitHub is up to date.
    2. Make sure everyone is able to attend the dailies.
    3. Make sure everyone is heard and contributes at dailies.
    4. If someone needs help, you help them find assistance or assist them yourself.
  • Before the dev meeting:
    1. Make sure the task board on GitHub is up to date.
    2. Make sure someone is ready to present the newest working version of the program, with all the new changes pushed
    3. Write down the state of tasks listed in the Sprint backlog
    4. Discuss what problems were encountered during the last Sprint, and how were they addressed.

Why Scrum isn’t perfect for gamedev

  • Gamedev is messy!
    • Following a rigid structure can limit the team’s output
    • Burndown charts detached from reality
  • Agile was developed mostly for teams where engineers are interchangeable
    • Game dev is just too fragmented for that
  • Long pre-production phase of creative exploration
    • …that usually bleeds into production…
    • $\Rightarrow$ a mess that resists planning
  • In gamedev, you don’t have a customer you can talk with
    • Even if you have a customer, they don’t know what they want
    • …because the game hasn’t been made yet!
    • Do ask your users regularly if the game is fun, though

Aki Kanerva: The ideas of Scrum that work for gamedev

  • Facilitate everyone staying up to date
  • Visualize progress
  • Break features down into tasks, and tasks into subtasks
  • Keep a backlog
  • Remember that plans are not set in stone and also need iteration
  • Check often if people are stuck
  • Estimate work
  • Stop often to evaluate the amount of meta work, including work estimates
  • Encourage people learning beyond their own discipline
  • Extra: Encourage ownership of features, not discipline (Not part of Scrum!)