Saturday, August 1, 2009

Scrum

At the moment I am part of a 15 person team, working like maniacs to get a video game to Alpha state. Despite all the hard work, communication issues keep slowing things down.

Enter SCRUM, a set of management techniques for complex software development, that can be applied to other kind of projects.

The idea is to gather the team together and set up short sprints of goals which will bring a set of features of the software to a finished state. One of the main tools in SCRUM is the daily 15 minute meeting, where each member of the team tells what they achieved the day before and what they will work on today, plus any obstacles that might be in their way. There is nothing like transparency to get things moving and to spot problems before they become catastrophes...

We've only started to implement this last week, but I can already say that it has affected the way people work and communicate, for the better. This works well for teams of 5 to 9 persons.

So if you have a project involving more than four people (and specially if they don't know each other well), I highly recommend you check this out. It's great for projects were different departments have to coordinate their efforts in a very specific order and time(in our case the art team and the coding team).

Some links:

what is scrum?

scrum in under 10 mins. video

the swedish version of the other video... note the difference in presentations!

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