Week 10 Agile
- Matt Wilson
- Dec 14, 2020
- 4 min read
Challenge Activity
User Stories
I decided to create a user story for my last Rapid Ideation Project. (Link)
“User stories are short, simple description of a feature told from the perspective of the person who desires the new capability, usually a user or customer of the system.” (Cohn, 2020)
(Wooward, 2015) suggests that for a game we would change the meaning “System” to “GamePlay” in the
Glen
Father and Full-time VFX artist and 3D sculptor
Loves games but feels he never has the time to play them as his time is dedicated to his work and family. Enjoys all things the base, likes problems solving and fast challenge. Enjoys games that are aesthetically pleasing but helps him to switch off and take time out. Glen sometimes finds himself waiting on meetings with times to spare where he will often sketch but would like to play too.
Quote – It's gonna have to be quick buddy, I have a call in 10 minutes with Sky.
Male, 50 years of age, white British. Business owner entrepreneur.
Goals,
I want to pick up and play without the added extra of remembering how to play.
I want the game to be visually calming or evoke amusement either one to feel good after playing
I want the game to offer a challenge that would encourage me to play it again
Agile, Scrum, and Kanban
Working in education and managing a course with two year groups and a team, the organisation is paramount especially to ensure I have some sort of life outside work. I was introduced to agile and scrum 3 years ago, albeit a very basic overview. It got me interested due to its flexibility to change with the outcome and I started to implement this into my working practice.
Breaking 6-week projects up into sprints for the staff and students meant that we could focus on our learning objectives and then review at the end of the sprint with an intention to alter or move onto the next objective. While doing this we would be showing the students the same techniques in managing their design projects and taking control of their learning. This would be smaller and less complex but crucial to introducing the students early to project management. Contemporary students are often characterised as incapable of holding attention on the same object for long (Manokin, Ozhegova, and Shenkman, 2018) Therefor we could be more adventurous in our expected outcomes without putting the student body under a great deal of pressure or overwhelming them with the size of the project.
We introduced Kanban and Scrum as best practices for our students and the team as KanBan being a more visual method of organising the projects the student would feel less overwhelmed by the structure. This would go further in giving students ownership over their learning as suggested by (Delhi. A 2015)
Although we have implemented the Kanban board into the classroom in its physical form it was necessary to have something that we could monitor throughout the process, have consistent access to and give multiple functions along with communication. We started to use Trello and this has been successfully implemented. This meant that we could also document this as part of an assessment. Using Trello as a Kanban board to support Scrum processes has several advantages, including making progress visible to the whole team and allowing details of every task (such as comments, checklists, due dates, and attachments) to be added to cards. (Parsons.D 2018) We as staff were also able to track collaboration.
For the Team, as opposed to students, Trello Kanban boards helped us to reach the project's goals and the learning objectives while keeping the learning focused on the Project. Meeting with the team always proves to be difficult with meetings often running over. It was felt the introduction of a stand up at the start of the week would be short and efficient but more importantly, face to face would help improve the direction of learning during the week. We would end the week off with a retrospective.Staff will be prepared for the meeting and the topic. Staff have a time limit, creating productive meetings.
“The most efficient method of conveying information to and within a development team is face to face conversations” (Principles behind the Agile Manifesto, n.d.)
A. Delhij, R. van Solingen and W. Wijnands, The eduScrum Guide, 2015, [online] Available: http://eduscrum.nl/en/file/CKFiles/The_eduScrum_Guide_EN_1.2.pdf.
D. Parsons, R. Thorn, M. Inkila and K. MacCallum, "Using Trello to Support Agile and Lean Learning with Scrum and Kanban in Teacher Professional Development," 2018 IEEE International Conference on Teaching, Assessment, and Learning for Engineering (TALE), Wollongong, NSW, 2018, pp. 720-724, doi: 10.1109/TALE.2018.8615399.
Agilemanifesto.org. n.d. Principles Behind The Agile Manifesto. [online] Available at: <http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html> [Accessed 14 December 2020].
Manokin, M., Ozhegova, A. and Shenkman, E., 2018. Agile Methodology In Education. [online] Ideas.repec.org. Available at: <https://ideas.repec.org/a/adf/journl/yid186.html> [Accessed 14 December 2020].
Cohn, M., 2020. User Stories And User Story Examples By Mike Cohn. [online] Mountain Goat Software. Available at: <http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/agile/user-stories> [Accessed 14 December 2020].
Wooward, J., 2015. User Stories: How To Maintain Structure With Creativity. [online] Gamasutra.com. Available at: <https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/JasonWoodward/20140519/218078/User_stories_How_to_maintain_structure_with_creativity.php> [Accessed 14 December 2020].
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