Minecraft SCRUM

27/10/2012

The Scrum approach is that the team works together as a whole to focus on releases composed of many short sprints. At the end of each cycle you should have a working version of the game.

The Scrum Team comes up with ideas they would like to see in the game and they think will work. The Scrum Master organises the team. The Product Owner collects customer opinions through questionnaires etc and then compares these to the team’s ideas. Any of the team’s ideas that customers said they definitely wouldn’t want in a game are removed.

The Product Backlog  is the list of features that will be in the final product. These need to be prioritised and a time frame should be estimated to complete the project. This is then refined by the Scrum Master and Product Owner and becomes the Release Backlog. The Scrum Team and Master then prioritise the Release Backlog and a time frame is applied to each feature.

SPRINT BACKLOG: Sprints can range from 2-30 days in length, Sprints are dependent on the release cycles – shorter cycles, shorter sprints, You should aim for a minimum of four sprints, Short but realistic representation of the development cycle. All sprints must be continually updated with remaining work hours. Team members can work on several objectives within one sprint. Total sprint time is updated and reviewed daily. Roles and responsibilities is assigned to team members to complete features within a sprint (hours for individuals also logged)Each sprint should be completed on time (realistic representation). Early indicator if the product will be delayed. Testing to identify bugs. Several sprints should be used for error checking/testing

Short meetings are held usually every day, where the following questions are asked What have you done since last meeting (yesterday)? What will you do between this and the next meeting (today – tomorrow)? Is there anything blocking or slowing down your job (impediments)?

Individuals sign up for work of their own choosing- Work is never assigned. Estimated work remaining is updated daily

We need to apply to Scrum to several assignments. We are creating a game in Multimedia Fusion, and also working as a team in Minecraft. We are going to use Microsoft Office to record our hours and ideas.

 

 

 

30/10/2012 Our Minecraft scrum challenge started yesterday. We need to build a maze, a rollercoaster, logic gates that play a game theme and 3D sculpture of a game character. BUT we have to use scrum to organise our team. My team is already failing at this because everyone just wants to play Minecraft instead of doing all the paperwork I don’t have this problem because the server won’t let me play! This week we need to work on the product backlog which is a big brainstorm of all our ideas about the processes, methods and components we need to think about for each task we have been given. I don’t doubt that we will finish all of the projects, I just hope everyone contributes to recording scrum which is the reason they are doing it! We are going to meet up on Friday to have a brainstorming session- everyone should have come up with a few ideas already. And then a product owner can refine it by getting everyone’s opinions. We should all be experts at Minecraft by now so we can all allocate business value, completion time and story points to each task and get ready for the next stages of scrum!

8/11/2012 10people responded to my questionnaire. I have gained some useful research. Not many people expressed their dislikes.

Q. Which biome would you like the maze to be located in?

1. Jungle

2. What biomes are there? (- I list them!) Jungle

3. Mountain

4. Underground rocky area

5. Underwater

6. Mountains

7. Hilly area above ground, with rocks.

8. Snow biome

9. Jungle or mountain

10. Inside a mountain

Jungle-3

Mountain- 6

Snow- 1
Underwater-1

Q.What features would you like to see in a maze?

1. Monsters and traps

2. Traps where you fall to your death or get blown up

3. Monsters that chase you

4. Puzzles, have clues dotted around with the coordinates on/ the right paths to take

5. Traps and monsters and treasure

6. Underground, with traps and hidden items. NOT monsters, it would be too easy to die.

7. Treasure chests and traps and dead ends

8. Parts where you have to swim underwater to get to the right way.

9. Monsters and items to find to help you.

10. Clues, treasure, traps and holes in the ground. Bed so you can spawn back in the maze when you die. Monsters chasing you like the labyrinth.

Monsters-5 (minus 1 dislike) = 4

Traps- 5

Treasure- 5

Underground -1

Underwater- 1

Clues- 2

Beds- 1

Q.What sort of blocks should the maze be made from?

1. Obsidian so you can’t dig through easily. Not dirt because you can just dig through it

2. Gravel/sand- it will fall on you if you dig through

3. Cobblestone or just stone

4. Trees

5. Wood and glass to confuse you because you can see the treasure etc but don’t know how to get to it

6. Stone. Not dirt.

7. Cobblestone and some glass

8. A mixture of materials

9. Stone. No glass or dirt or gravel because you can break it to get through

10. Obsidian

Obsidian- 2

Gravel-1 (minus 1 for dislike) =0

Sand- 1

Stone/ Cobblestone- 3

Glass- 2 (minus 1 for dislike) =1

Wood- 1

Dirt- -3 (minus 3)

Q.Which biome would you like the roller coaster to be located in?

1. Should go through several areas

2. Snow

3. Jungle area, with water features

4. Mountains

5. Mountain high area

6. In Hell/ Have a roller coaster that goes to hell

7. In the sea

8. Mountains

9. Desert

10. Highest Mountain

Different Areas- 1

In Hell- 1

In the Ocean- 1

Desert- 1

Mountains-4

Snow- 1

Jungle- 1

Q.What features would you like to see on the roller coaster?

1. Water slides

2. Surprises

3. Water features

4. A loop if you can do that

5. Looping and switching tracks

6. Danger, should go to hell through a netherportal

7. Underwater

8. Underground , could take you to your maze.

9. Should take you around all the other features you are building

10. Water and underground, lava for danger.

Water- 4

Nether Portal- 1

Loops- 2

Underground- 1

Travel around other features- 1

Q.What material should the roller coaster be made from?

1. Wood

2. Wooden

3. Diamonds

4. Wood

5. Metal

6. Iron

7. Wood.

8. A mixture of wood, stone and colourful things

9. Brick or wood

10. Wooden

Wood- 7

Brick- 1

Diamonds- 1

Iron- 1

Stone- 1

Coloured- 1

Q.Which video game character should we create a statue of?

1. Sonic

2. Niko Bellic

3. Kirby

4. Sonic

5. Spyro the Dragon

6. Mario

7. Mario.

8. Mario

9. Wario

10. Lara Croft

Sonic- 2

Spyro- 1

Mario- 3

Niko Bellic- 1

Wario- 1

Lara Croft- 1

Kirby- 1

Q.Which materials should the video game character be made from?

1. Coloured wool

2. Colourful materials

3. Bricks, stone, wood

4. Dyed Wool

5. Wool

6. Wool

7. Stone and brick

8. Mixture of materials

9. Dyed Wool

10. Dyed Wool

Dyed Wool- 6

Stone-2

Brick- 2

A mixture of materials- 4

Q.Which video game theme tune is your favourite?

1. Mario

2. Tetris

3. Tetris

4. Sonic

5. Super Mario Bros- Original

6. Skyrim

7. Mario

8. Sonic

9. Tetris

10. Tetris

Mario- 3

Sonic- 2

Tetris- 4

Skyrim- 1

Q.How should the music play? (Press a button, stand on a pressure plate, pull a lever etc?)

1. Press a button, NOT pressure plate.

2. Press a button

3. Press a button

4. Pull a lever or press a button

5. Press a button

6. Pull Lever

7. Press Button

8. Pressure Plate

9. Press button

10. Press a button

Press a button-  8

Pressure Plate- 1 (minus 1 dislike) = 0

Lever- 2

 10/11/2012 Our team has been working to break down each process so that we can start our sprints. We are still waiting for several people to conduct research so that we can really refine our ideas but working with the research we already have, we have a strong idea of what we are going to be producing.

We have been recording our hours worked on the project already to get into good habits, even though we don’t need to produce a burndown chart until we begin our sprints.

I am concerned that the communication in our group isn’t very good between some members and maybe this will cause problems for us when dividing up the work and ensuring everything gets done.

We have already begun to use the poker technique for each process. We are all giving each process a number for story points, time and effort. When everyone has provided a score for each then we will work out the average.

12/11/2012 Today I have looked over the processes we have decided on for each sprint. We have roughly divided the processes up into sprints but we need to put all of this information into an Excel chart. This way we can give each process a value for time, effort and priority. We tried doing this already using the poker method but not everyone responded as our group is hard to communicate with so this technique didn’t work. We are going to proceed with having an expert on each subject from the group give us these values to work with. We need to create the burndown charts once we have the total time for each sprint and the overall project. Rad is taking the results of our questionnaires and putting them into charts using Excel. Unless the server is reset we are going to need to backtrack a lot of the processes as we have already done several of the sprints, for example making basic tools, mining ores, collecting resources, building a base. Hopefully our team will work together from now on as I’m finding it difficult to be motivated when not everyone is contributing! We should have the release backlog and sprints organised by tomorrow so we can begin work on the actual project on Wednesday. We need to ensure that everyone is recording their hours worked, otherwise it will look like they haven’t done any work… We are also going to ensure we have daily meetings via the moodle forum and hopefull yeveryone will contribute.

Update!
I have organised the processes into sprints on the release backlog spreadsheet.We are meeting online tonight to try and make the poker technique work again.

13/11/2012 I am so tired!
We have been working on allocating priority, difficulty and hours to our processes. Rad has completed the charts to show our results so we now know what we need to build our projects out of.

18/11/2012 Before the weekend we all started work on sprints. I decided to work on the ongoing collecting resources sprint, so I have been mining resources and collecting wood and wool. We are keeping in touch via the forum on moodle and also using facebook to make sure everyone gets the message. I haven’t been on much this weekend because I have been busy but I tried to put in a lot of hours during the week and I still made sure I was in contact with the team and I know wht has been completed and what needs to be done. The maze is taking a long time to build and using a lot of cobblestone which I have been collecting; Surely it would have been easier to dig out the maze rather than build it? -_- We haven’t started work on the statue yet, and Adam and Taz’ s rollercoaster sprint hasn’t progressed and they haven’t been replying to the daily meetings so I don’t know what’s happening! Most of us are still recording our hours worked on each sprint and aspect of the projec, so we will be able to create burndown charts easily. Although, looking at our predicted time for some of the processes I think  we are going to be way over the time we thought it would take. Also sprints we didn’t realise would be ongoing have become ongoing, I think this will have to be something we mention in our presentation.

20/11/2012 Our project is nearly over!
We have nearly completed all but one of our sprints now. I am currently working othe finishing touches of the maze and collecting resources to complete this. The rollercoaster sprint has not been completed because the assigned person hasn’t worked on the sprint. I think everyone is going to work together to try and get the rollercoater finished before Friday. I have found the collecting resources sprint to be a hard one to record as it is ongoing and the processes seem to change all the time as we meet new problems and need extra resources etc. I am currently working on producing the burndown chart for the collecting resources sprint, I think it i going to show a huge different between the predicted and actual hours worked because the whole project has used a lot more resources than we expected and it has taken longer to collect the necessary resources than we originally thought too.

23/11/2012 Finally! I don’t have to play Minecraft anymore! 😀

Two of our sprints ended up being incomplete, which is disappointing but we had a lot of issues. With people not being able to go online etc. Our paperwork is hopefully going to be completed over the weekend, my burndown chart is finished but I need to alter it when people finally record the hours they have worked on certain sprints. I have uploaded screenshots to the Dropbox to be used for our presentation. The hours we predicted were much less than the actual time it took, so we will have to talk about this in our presentation.

 

24/11/2012 I’m currently working on my burndown chart, I’m doing it the way I think it should be done, as members of my group have done it differently. It shows the hours versus days, both projected and actual. I’m having some trouble because not everyone recorded their hours so it will be inaccurate but there’s nothing I can do about it. I am working on the presentation too. I uploaded a lot of screenshots to our dropbox and I am going to include those in the presentation. I am going to work on the collecting resources section of the presentation in particular.

I have enjoyed using the scrum methodology, but it has been very difficult to implement when not everyone is willing to contribute and work as a team. I think I have a good understanding of how the methodology is used and why it is useful for managing a team working on a project. However I am looking forward to being able to focus my attention on the rest of my work, as this project has taken up a lot of my time!