Today we had a on-line meeting/seminar with Kjartan Vidarsson that now work as a producer at NDS, he worked previously at Deadline Games and IO Interactive.

Kjartan first talked about his experience with Scrum and then let us talk about our game and how we use Scrum. It was very productive to discuss how we use Scrum with a person that handled over 100 Scrum teams over the years. We mostly discussed how we used Scrum and how we could manage things to get more effective.

Some of the things he suggested were:
- We could get in trouble because our team is around 10 people and the ideal size of Scrum team is around 3-6 people.
- We should have our daily Scrums meetings earlier than 14.00 (2 pm)
- We should have a voting system for what new features we should implement and focus on.
- We should modify our release plans and have more “test released” planed.
- We should define and have a protocol where we could measure if a task was done or not in a Sprint.

One nice thing was that when Kjartan got our main “scrum document” (we send it to him in the middle of the meeting) he was quiet for some time and we asked why he didn’t say anything and he said that he was really impressed by it. Though he didn’t really understand some of the not used (filled in) pages we had in the document. When we told him that it was “burn down charts” (that we didn’t really use) he was even more impressed.

Kjartan also told us that he was looking forward to hear and see more about Penalty of Heroes. It’s things like that that makes you work even harder : )

* HERE’s an old blog post how we use scrum in development of PoH

Tags: Deadline Games, IO Interactive, Kjartan Vidarson, NDS, Penalty of Heroes, producer, scrum, seminar

This entry was posted on Monday, February 9th, 2009 at 6:12 pm and is filed under databox games, meeting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.