Lock, Load, Code.

In this episode of "Adventures In Agile", our heroes met their greatest enemy so far - ambiguity! After electing "Paranormal Investigators" as our semester project, the creator took on the role of Product Owner for the week. He fleshed out his vision for the game, and the group began breaking the project into individual pieces. When a project first starts off, you rarely have all the details handed to you immediately. Similar to designing a programming project from scratch, you have to employ your abstract thinking skills. This requires you to start from the top, and work your way down. An idea breaks down features, breaking further down into tasks. When these tasks are well-defined, team members can take the work and run. When the tasks are ambiguous though, you'll get a science experiment gone wrong. Once each person is done completing their tasks, it can be thought of as a puzzle piece. They gather together at the end of the Sprint, and present their piec...

This is the first post in a series that will be documenting my experiences in MATC's CSG 127 class, Agile Project Management. Over the course of this semester, our class will be working as a team, implementing Agile principles as we develop a board game. This will include Scrum, Kanban, Planning Poker, along with passing around the various roles in a typical Agile team. For many team members, this is not their first foray into Agile. MATC's CSG program gets students into an Agile environment from the beginning. For others such as myself, we will be learning this as we go along. As we begin laying the ground work for our board game project, this adventure has already provided some entertainment and frustration. As I read through the textbook, examples of how and how-not to implement Agile are given, which includes both the methodologies and the principles that allow teams to succeed. Real world implementation definitely seems more difficult so far! Humans are humans, imperfect...