Agile Game Development with Scrum - Essay Example

Cross-discipline teams: Variegated team members could place the team at a disadvantage if their skills are not well harnessed. Through the sprint medium, scrum requires the team to focus and synchronize their objectives. This allows needed features to be developed, and benefit from a robust support base.Self Management and organization: Scrum teams are self-managed and organized. This autonomy allows them to optimize resource usage and returns.Team Size: Another enabling feature scrum introduces is a small team size.

Small team sizes experience greater productivity by cutting off the redundancy and sub-optimal behavior common to large teams. Leadership: Scrum environments provide the framework and support for the development of scrum masters, who in turn are best suited to drive agile teams. Leadership in agile teams entails project design and planning, resource allocation, mentoring individual team members, and team performance review.Building CohesionAgile offers us several team structures that support team cohesion and collaboration in agile environments.

These include sharing disciplines in short supply (feature-driven teams), building a team around disciplines (functional teams), Phase-dependent team grouping (Production teams), raising a support (shared infrastructure) team, having an upstream-downstream support team relationship (tool teams), providing slack resources (pool teams), and using an integration team to integrate the different team outputs.Scaling and Distributing ScrumScrum thrives on co-location and constant team interaction. In the contemporary world, this is not always possible.

Keith gives us some insights into scaling and distributing Scrum for nimbleness. These are achieved by:i. Use of scrum of scrums meetings to allow the different teams to “inform other teams about their progress and impediments” (2010). ii. A hierarchy of owners to provide faster feedback and drive the project through conception to implementation.iii. Aligning sprint dates: This allows fluid team composition and enables an integrated view of the project.iv. Creating communities of practice to facilitate idea sharing and eliminate duplication of efforts, andv.

Avoiding inter-team dependencies.SummaryAll in all, Keith’s analysis of the use of agile methods gives no ground rules but advises teams to “use the retrospective practice to find ways to improve how they work together and with the project stakeholders” (2010, 8).