Why Agile?

Use these resources to dive further into Agile, learn about the Agile Manifesto and review how solo developers utilize it's methods to make progress in their work:

• Escaping the Indie Shame Spiral. A producer at Electronic Arts goes indie and ... fails. Agile to the rescue! “The critical first step to escaping the shame spiral was to start running a personal scrum as though I was leading a team back at EA.”
• Scrum Of One: How to Bring Scrum into your One-Person Operation. A solo app developer shares an in-depth look at how he uses Scrum/Agile methods to make steady progress on his work. “Scrum seemed to touch on three of the biggest pain points in my process: More productivity, more profit, more happiness.”
• For reference, here’s the original (very short) Agile manifesto.

In this assignment you’ll make your sprint plan for the next version of your vertical slice. As a reminder a sprint plan is a prioritized list of tasks to work on in the next week.

You’ve actually already made a sprint plan – you did it last week when you pulled things out of your project backlog to work on, according to priority.

The full process (i.e. the one used by professionals) has a few more steps, but the goal is still the same: step back and decide how you can best move your game forward this week.

The instructions will be the same for each week for the rest of the project. When you’re finished you’ll turn in some form of your sprint plan as screenshots or a recorded video.

Weekly Sprint Review and Plan

These instructions describe the exact process that professional teams of all sizes use to manage the work of game development. It has several steps, and it looks long because each step is explained, but it should only take 5-10 minutes to do for a small project.

You’ll use the same system you used when you made your backlog, whether that’s a spreadsheet, a to-do manager like Trello, or a dedicated system like JIRA.

Part 1: Review

Taking a couple of minutes to learn from your experience each week will make you a better developer.

• Get better at estimating. Look at your current sprint plan – that’s the to-do list you made last week. Observe what you did and didn’t get done. Look at the estimates of effort you made for each item. Were you able to make an accurate guess about how long the task took? If not, what was it that made the work take longer? Just stopping to think about it will make you better at estimating your work in the future.
• Recognize your hard work. You might be disappointed in your progress this week – that’s actually pretty normal. But take a moment and pat yourself on the back for what you did get done. You’ve climbed a little further toward being a game maker, and everything you did this week will be easier from now on.
• Reset. Take everything you didn’t finish and put it back in your backlog. That might mean copying and pasting in a spreadsheet or physically moving Post-It notes, depending on your system.

Part 2: Plan

• Leave the room. It’s a good idea to physically stand up and leave the room, but failing that, at least close your eyes. Imagine your game in its final form. Think about where your game is currently, that is, what’s already visible in the build. Then open your eyes and return to your work station.
• Update your backlog. Look at the stories in your backlog. Based on your vision of the final game, do you notice anything missing? Is anything unnecessary or not as important as you thought? Are there any stories that could be combined or split into smaller parts?

Once you’ve updated the list of stories, look at each story in turn. Ignore its current priority and whether you’ve already done work on it. How important is it, right now, to finishing your game? Update its priority accordingly.

• Look at your availability. No week is the same. Do you have doctor appointments, lunch dates, algebra tests, or meetings with your agent? Think about each day in turn and write down how many hours you will have to give to your game this week. If the answer is zero, write zero. If you plan to work all seven days, consider taking a day off in the middle so you don’t burn out.
• Choose your tasks. Now that you’ve identified the most important remaining work and the time you have to spend on it, choose stories from your backlog that you will work on this week. As you copy them into this week’s plan, go ahead and give some thought to how you will implement them. Does your estimate of effort (1, 2, 4 or 8 hours) seem about right? When you’re done, make sure your total workload matches up with your actual availability this week.

Once your current sprint plan is complete upload it as screen shots or video capture explaining how you decided what to prioritize.