Scrumming realXtend

Posted by on January 15, 2009 under Ideas, howto | Be the First to Comment

realXtend project used the Scrum methodology from the beginning. The reason for this was the nature of the project. It was really hard to estimate what we could achieve within 6 calendar months we got the funding for. The goal was simple enough; to make a demo prototype of a future virtual world platform that is good enough to get more funding to continue the effort. So we really needed to do as good demo as possible.

A screenshot from a testing session.

The Scrum methodology we learned from an excellent book: Scrum and XP from the Trenches by Henrik Kniberg. The book is absolutely the best and easiest to read about how to use Scrum in practice.

realXtend project started with two participating Finnish companies, Ludocraft and Admino technologies. The companies are both located at the Oulu area, but they are still located quite far from each other. In the Scrum methodology the whole Scrum team must be co-located for two main reasons; to maximize the communication bandwidth between team members and secondly, to have the daily scrum meetings together.

Initially we had everyone working at the same scrum team and we used skype between the two offices for the daily scrum meetings. It was working, but not as good as it should. Irc, physical visits, email and skype were all used every day to keep things synchronized.

After two months of work, the realXtend platform was at the stage where we decided to move our daily scrum meetings to the virtual space. It was awful. Everyone looked the same - our first woman avatar, which was later called as “crack-slut madonna” by someone, she had just white underwear and no hair… voice was working through team speak software. Opensim had some serious problems at that time, objects were lost and big craters appeared to the landscape. We partly moved back to skype, but continued to use realXtend for the meetings weekly.

Eating our own dogfood did good to the development. Scrum helped us to always work on most important issues and we did not need to worry about changing a project plan like we would have done with the waterfall project management model.

Scrum did not work so well with some of the content oriented tasks. Artists need time to think and be creative and they did not like Scrum. If I had to do the first six months again for the realXtend, I would left artists out of the daily Scrum meetings and keep their tasks out of sprint backlogs. I would still have them present at the sprint planning meetings as it is essential to synchronize their work with the software developers.

At the end of the six month period we had moved realXtend sprint and product backlogs to Google docs, and we used a big virtual wall with sections to move tasks around. Tasks were small notes containing the name of the task. The synchronization between Google docs and the virtual wall was done by hand, and they were quite often not in sync.

The effective virtual world Scrum work clearly needs a virtual world application to support it. Copying the real world task wall did not work well enough - see a previous article, where I discuss about how to effectively use virtual worlds and avoid their weaknesses. The synchronization between virtual world application and a spreadsheet should work instantly and automatically.

After the fist six month the realXtend project moved to more traditional project management for a period of four months (March 2008 - June 2008). The reason for this was that the new funding source wanted to have exact task lists for the Avatar 2 sub-project. Even as the results were good in terms of software and content, this did not work very well when compared to Scrum. Many tasks slipped over their deadlines and the project management felt like a real work for a while.

From July 2008 the project used Scrum again.

The key findings summarized:

• Scrum works well for high risk projects with limited visibility
• Scrum does not fit well to content oriented work
• Virtual worlds allow Scrum teams to work in a multi-site setting
• A specific Scrum application built on top of realXtend would dramatically increase the efficiency
• Virtual world applications need to be integrated to old fashioned applications (like the spreadsheet).