Ready, set, Scrum!

In order to keep track of our progress and make sure that we keep on schedule me and my group have been using an Agile development methodology called Scrum. The goal is to constantly work towards creating a minimum viable product, and iterating on that until the product has the features and quality desired. It is also characterized by working in small teams with short daily meetings in order to make sure that everyone knows what is going within the project.

For our team Scrum has been a bit of a mixed bag. Mostly stemming from our inexperience with the method, and also because of the circumstances of the project. We’ve been good at grouping up and having meetings with each other. Most weekdays we meet up in order to have our daily stand up meeting where we discuss what we’ve been doing since yesterday, and go over what we’re gonna do until tomorrow. This has been helped by the fact that we’ve been meeting up to work together on the days we don’t have any lectures.

The lectures are however a part of one of the problems we’ve been having. At the start we estimated that each workweek we would spend 20 hours each on the project. However, due to lectures, meetings and other classes, the time that we’ve been able allocate towards the project have been lower than that. At least if we aim not to work during the weekends. This makes the initial planning we did at the start of the project inaccurate, and we’ve had a hard time meeting the 20 hour work hours that we plan for. As the project has progressed we have been scaling down the planned work hours for each member so that we can get a more realistic estimate on the amount of progress we are able to achieve during each week.

One thing that could also help us is to get better and get a better routine on how to work with Scrum. For example, both our sprint planning and review could be completed quicker in order to give us more working time. Right now, due to our inexperience and poor execution in how we’ve set up our backlog, we spend a lot of time discussing and figuring out what needs to be done each week. This is something we all agree that we will work on for our next projects, where we might also be able to have sprints that are two weeks long, instead of one week sprints. Having sprints last two weeks would halve the amount of big meetings we have, and also allow us to have a better flow when working. Right now it feels as if we don’t have enough time to really start working on something before a sprint review is coming up.

All in all, there are definitely benefits working via Scrum, but right now we are having some troubles getting it to work because of the circumstances of the project as well as our inexperience. We are learning a lot about what is working and what is not, which will help us as the project continues, as well as for future projects.

That’s all I had to say for now, Esbjörn out!