scrum agile software develpoment
polycounter lvl 12
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_%28development%29
does anyone have experience working with this methodology? Is it worth my time to study upon it?
does anyone have experience working with this methodology? Is it worth my time to study upon it?
Replies
Even if you're not following scrum, there are some interesting ideas in it which you can incorporate in existing workflows. If you're a team lead and want to get ideas how to better run your team then I would look into it. If you're not a team lead then it may not be very useful because to follow scrum as it is intended you need a team. Pure scrum seems to be rather rare in our industry because you need very mature and somewhat disciplined and experienced people; plus art tasks don't always seem to work for Scrum.
I got a few Scrum books, but [ame="http://www.amazon.com/The-Power-Scrum-Jeffrey-Sutherland/dp/1463578067/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1359442568&sr=8-1&keywords=the+power+of+scrum"]this one[/ame] here is the best intro. It's more like a story/dialogue between a guy with a sluggish and buggy project and another guy who helps him apply scrum to it to keep the project going again. It's a pretty short read and not as dry as some other books about the subject. Once you understand the principle you can pick up more theoretical books - there's a lot of them!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Management_fad
mostly bs sold by people who are good at selling bs.
at the end of the day it is all waterfall.
but you don´t realy need to learn it or anything.
if you land a gig you will surely be introduced to the concept, and it is not that hard to understand from a production perspektive.
you only have to fully understand it if you are the one responsibly for planning all the tasks, meaning if you are a lead artist or a producer.
but if you plan on entering the industry as a usual artist, you don´t realy need to have mastered scrum to work with it.
Used to use it at halfbrick when i was there.
And no at the end of the day it isnt all waterfall. Scrum is all about perspective.
Waterfall and Agile are two overall development processes. Scrum is a method of Agile. Most games projects I have seen go with Agile, with a strong leaning towards Scrum.
We use Agile and its various methods.
I haven't met anyone yet who claimed they do scrum right. most people admit to bending the implementation somewhat to their needs.
yup. At first I was WTF but now after a year of using it I prefer it.
The exception being Valve but they seem to have evolved an across the board egalitarian style of development. Where a scrum might exist inside of a top down management style company, Valve bucks that trend and goes egalitarian all over the place.
I would have said that we bend it to fit our needs, but we pretty much follow the Wikipedia article pretty closely. It was annoying at first, but now I would feel excluded or uninformed if we didn't do it.
In my experience, most of the good parts of scrum come down to production common sense, and there's parts of the methodology that bogged down the art process. With that said, my experience is just using scrum at one studio, and was as a lead. The producers went and got scrum certified, and we followed what I believe to be the "standard" scrum procedures.
project management is always worth a while. Currently IT industry is using agile so I would recommend it.
Scrum; study it anyways, some companies have this way of working others dont.
For this, you have to go through the recruiters in order to get in as a Software analyst.
Edit: scrum is a style, agile is the flow of the ways of how different methodologies work in it. If you dig deeper, you will get know the part of white box and black box testing. For all these things you should have a firm knowledge of sdlc and stlc. I would suggest you should understand the water fall flow before agile.
haha. The most annoying things about scum are those people who treat it like a cult. or the ones who insist on using the scrum lingo for everything.
I would love to keep it up at my University, I did try but my hair started to fall out as I soon found that academics are not the most agile as they like to deliberated over long engaged careful consideration and then weigh up the odds in a research paper. And we all work in a bureaucratic system so implementing any new ideas is very slow and full of paper work!
basically you need PM's to know how to use it properly. A tool is only as good as its user. As artists we can appreciate that.
"What's your estimate?"
"I'd say 5"
"We need it tomarrow."
"Then why did you ask?"
"I wanted to make sure we are on the same page...I'll put you down for a 1 then."
One company:
PM: Ok how long will it take you to fully greyblock out all the gameplay in this area?
Me: Hmm, well with the size complexity and testing, probably a month.
PM: Well, that's an issue.... Can you do it in 2 weeks?
(coworker over her shoulder goes wide eyed and slowly shakes his head)
Me: Urrrm (trying to be proactive), it can probably be PLAYABLE, but won't be polished and will have bugs.
PM: OH that's ok! just want a first pass!
-- 2 Weeks Later --
PM: There are bugs and issues with the greyblock!! how can we call this done?? We need to push everything back now!
Me: /faceplam
Luckly I did a followup email to confirm the plan and resolutions after the first meeting.
Game dev is too chaotic for Waterfall to work, it's a recipe for disaster. I also think that game dev can be too unpredictable and fragmented at times for Agile/Scrum to work. In my experience you take what works for you and your team and the project you are workign on from all of the methodologies and make some hybrid bastard step child but all in all I thing scrum/agile has more potential than the rest.
If you want to go straight to the source about it check out a guy named Clinton Keith, he's the guy that basically brought scrum in full force to the games industry and he knows better than anyone else where it works and where it doesn't
http://www.shotgunsoftware.com/
I had the similar questions in mind then decided to move on and do it and found it tremendous.