[game_edu] SCRUM in Game Development

[Philip Tan]

I've co-written a couple of papers describing our experience of using Scrum
with students. From the most recent to the oldest:

http://gambit.mit.edu/readme/Iterative%20Game%20Design%20in%20Education%20-%20Print%20version.pdf

http://gambit.mit.edu/readme/readme/pdfs/Fernandez%20-
%20Situated%20Learning%20and%20Videogame%20Curriculum.pdf

http://gambit.mit.edu/readme/Chap%2013%20-%20Jenkins%20et%20al.pdf

One thing about Scrum is that there really isn't any downtime built into the
typical sprint cycle. As soon as one ends, you're immediately planning the
next. In practice, this is dramatically different from the ebb and flow of
most college coursework, where effort tends to ramp up immediately prior to
a big milestone or assessment. Students are very used to cycles of crunching
hard before deadlines and crashing afterwards.

So one of my ongoing challenges is getting students used to sustainable
development practices -- admittedly more of an Agile tenet than specifically
a Scrum practice. Scrum teams that try to do the typical student ramp-up
cycle sprint after sprint are constantly operating at a diminished capacity
due to illnesses, oversleeping, and less-than-lucid meetings. I would argue
that it's not really in the spirit of agile development.

As an instructor, I find myself really having to hammer this point home
early and often. It's really difficult to eliminate all crunch, but in my
experience, it's possible to teach students to recognize crunch as a process
that has gone wrong and needs to be fixed, instead of simply accepting it as
a regular part of the work. I prefer to have students guiltily admit that
they crunched instead of wearing it as some sort of badge of honor, because
they'll try to plan the next sprint better.

It's also good to have several different teams running simultaneously and
have their scrummasters meet up periodically to share tips; it makes it
easier for them to realize that their teams are facing certain problems that
they might not have otherwise recognized.
----
Philip Tan
Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab


On Sat, Jan 8, 2011 at 1:48 PM, Nic Colley <Nic.Colley at cpcc.edu> wrote:


> Happy New Year All!

>

> What lessons have you learned while using SCRUM and any best practices?

>

> I ask this as I am currently building a class "Agile Game Development". In

> this class I will be focusing on SCRUM with projects while talking about

> other development practices. I am able to pull from my experiences with

> SCRUM, but to better serve the students, I thought I should ask the

> community on their experiences.

>

> Thanks,

> Nic Colley

> Faculty, Simulation & Game Development

> Nic.Colley at cpcc.edu

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