Week 1, Sprint 1

Despite the misleading name, Sprint doesn’t mean faster. In fact, we were much slower during the Sprint week compared to the week before. That week, I started and completed a fully-functionalBlackJack minigame, while the rest of the team finished a TicTacToe minigame, the menu bar, and an ‘egg’ pet which can be fed and be ‘happy’.

We were much faster then, however despite the slower speed, I believe the Sprint helped us make a much ‘better product’.

Before trying out the Scrum Way, we used the divide & conquer way — which is just a fancy way to say that we assigned each individual work to do on their own, with view to merge it at a later date. Much of the time was spent working on our own with minimal communication with each other, unless we had a technical problem.

We didn’t look at each others’ code, we didn’t know where each member was at with their tasks (aside from the occasional progress update videos), and when trying to merge all the mini-projects together, we saw that the coding style, naming culture, and theme were all over the place.

Sure we got a lot done, however the technical debt was huge! Future iterations would have moved seriously slow since we would have to rewrite a lot of code, and try to make sense of what the originalgangster coder was trying to do. We ran ourselves into a dead-end, but when all hope seemed lost, in comes Scrum to save the day!

At the start of the week, I migrated our existing work to an initial working template for our team to work on (so that we keep the coding culture) and make it much easier for us to merge our code later on. Cleaning up after our mess was hellish, but necessary. We created some placeholder graphic and icons, and also made it compatible with different phone screens. We also ran into some bugs to do with tapping the screen quickly, but Sam found a pretty cool solution (taking inspiration from locking in our OS class) after we talked it out.

We had daily standup meetings, but it didn’t feel like we were gaining much from it, since we keep in touch regularly in Line anyway. It felt like we were doing it more as a chore rather than really gaining something out of it. Plus, some members weren’t able to make it every day, and they were the ones that were most likely to benefit from listening to the group progress in meetings. We did try to allow Skype call-ins, but it was hard to communicate ideas through the computer screen. Holding group meetings so often seemed to reduce the importance of it.

At the end of the week, we had our very first Sprint Retrospective. P’Pond had hyped the activity up by talking about the one time he had witnessed a emotionally-intensive, 4+ Hour Sprint Retrospective. In all honesty, I just expected it to be a small review session of how the week went, and just people being nice to each other — and that’s how it pretty much started out. However, when we had to write post-it notes about what regarding the project made us ‘Happy’, ‘Sad’, and what ‘Could be Improved’. It was then that I realised that there will be no better time to reflect on our team’s shortcomings, and hopefully suggest improvements without creating too much conflicts.

I posted notes calling people out by name to make sure that people did know how the team was feeling about a certain behaviour which wasn’t completely appreciated. I don’t like talking behind people’s backs, and I think this activity really did help make the communication more transparent and brought the team more closer than before. Though most people did accept the constructive criticism wholeheartedly, there were a couple of people who were initially defensive, but later saw the team’s Point-Of-View, and understood where we were coming from. Though threatening to boil over at certain points in time, it was largely a civil affair, and ultimately it was probably the best part of the sprint (as the team got more involved with the project, and there was much better communication between members).

In conclusion, Sprint Retrospective works!