On 07/01/2011 02:37 AM, Adolfo R. Brandes wrote:
This would be a very rough estimate with discussion (...)
Then each team (code/art/etc) would meet separately (...)
we could follow this pattern within a single meeting.
I like this idea, because as you probably know, sprint planning
sessions tend to go on forever if not moderated properly. By
separating into different areas, the process lends itself to
paralellization, and so potentially ends quicker.
However, this should not mean that the different areas are exempt from
knowing what others are doing and how they depend on each other.
After all, it would be pointless if the art department finishes a
sprint, but development doesn't (or vice-versa): there would be
nothing to deliver! Again, it would the the Scrum Master's job to not
let this happen.
Agreed, that is one of the main challenge of scrum in video games, the
quantity of dependancies.
There are tools for the scrum master to ease the communication between
teams in vg production, that we can discuss. For instance, at my
previous job we usually added to the traditionnal scrum task board
another board where the teams are represented in column, and the lines
are the user stories, so that when a task is finished by a team, it
moves to the next team who becomes aware that their task for the user
story is now available to work on.
On the topic of duration, regarding the use of redmine:
I'm glad you brought this up, because I think it would be best for
Farsides to, at some point (probably not now), separate payment and
performance metrics as much as possible from the Scrum workflow, for
the same reason that it is not recommended for the Scrum Master to be
the same person that signs the checks (or even the team's manager). I
don't exactly know HOW to do that based on what I've seen, but it
would be detrimental to the team if, for example, a member does not
ask for help because he/she is afraid that that will have a direct,
negative impact on how much money will be made at the end of the
month. Or worse, a team member might be disencouraged to help another
one, because his time would be worth more money on a new ticket!
no concept of user story duration, only of tasks. To avoid this confusion. What
do you think ?
Only tasks with durations will work, I agree. But at some point you
guys are going to want to be able to know how long things are going to
take without either guessing or spending copious amounts of time
specifying each story's individual tasks and durations. Enter the
infamous "Story Points":
My stories never had durations, they had bananas. It was just a way
to tell if one story was bigger than the other, in a very rough way.
So, for instance, Story #1 would be worth 5 bananas, while Story #2
would be worth 13. Tasks, however, would have definite time estimates
in hours. So what would happen is that for the first sprints, nobody
would know exactly how long it would take to finish a user story just
from its bananas (but that would be ok, because the tasks were
estimated). It sounds crazy, but after a while, once the team knows
how many bananas it can take on each sprint, it becomes very easy for
the Product Manager to give good ball-park time estimates on user
stories that have nothing but bananas on them, without the need to
specify individual tasks and estimate their individual durations.
Anyway... I think it would be a good start just to separate stories
from tasks. With Redmine, I think that would be as easy as adding a
new tracker called "Stories" and another one called "Tasks", with
appropriate relations between individual tickets so one can tell what
task belongs to what story.
+ 1 for the bananas. I like bananas :) And separating the measurement of
paid tasks and of sprint volume is exactly what i had in mind. So I
thank you for the bananas idea.
I'm not sure how to approach this on redmine. My first idea was to make
user stories abstract objects (not represented on redmine) based on a
main task and all its related tasks, but i think that your idea of
creating a new tracker is better. At least I'd like to try that.
Xav you are more familiar than me with the redmine workflow, what is
your opinion on this ?
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