KAsiUNblog

Unkasoft's blog, where we talk about mobile games development, gaming industry, agile methodologies and all that matter we're handling every day

Saturday, August 19, 2006

SCRUM at Unkasoft: the sprint

Let’s follow with our SCRUM series… dealing with sprints.

We can say SCRUM’s sprints are something similar to XP’s iterations, although with several differences.

We could define a sprint as the total amount of time that development team has in order to implement, document and test a set of new functionality (this set is called “increment”). At the end of the sprint, we should have a ready-to-use, shrinkwrapped version ready to be delivered to any customer.

Typically, one sprint is split in three phases:

1.- Planning: a meeting with product owner together with development team with next goals:
All these tasks will be noted down in one new spreadsheet called “sprint backlog”. We don’t note new features (user histories), but it turn into concrete tasks (refactor X, research Y and so on).
In sprint backlog we’re going to write the amount of hours remaining until each tasks was done.

2.- Implementation: once we’ve get our sprint backlog, we can start the development. Both parties (product owner and dev team) should agree they can’t add new tasks until sprint ends. If one new feature comes up, it will be added to product backlog and it will be taken into account for next sprint.
Everyday during sprint development, whole dev team will meet to review the progress and up to date the sprint backlog. This is the “daily meeting” and we’ll tackle it next day.

3.- Review: once the sprint has been completed, product owner and team will meet every other interested part (marketing people, customers, etc) and an informal demo will be done to show new functionality (called “increment”). During this meeting could arise one or more new features and them will be noted down at product backlog.

In the other side, dev team will meet themselves and will think about:

For instance:
- Tony
: we’ve failed with new renderers test.
- Johnny: yes, it was a sheer hell
- Tony: As soon as we have some free time, we should research how we can automate it.
- Johnny: yes, I note it down to add it at next sprint.
- Tony: By the way, undo/redo prototype feature went really good.
- Johnny: it’s true. It was a good thing that we spend a couple of hours writing a small prototype in order to prove whether Command and Memento design pattern works as expected.
- Tony: OK, next chances we can use prototypes too.

Next day we'll talk about daily work of one sprint and the daily meeting.

Comments:
Post a Comment



<< Home

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?