Today was a very hectic and exhausting day, though it was also very useful and fun!
We started at 9.30 today, because two other students were giving presentations to those interested. The first was about Quality Monitoring & Implementation, and the second about how you should prepare for an audio assessment. Both were useful, seeing as I had little idea what QMI entailed and I'd only heard that audio was hard. Now it doesn't seem so hard, if you just do specifically what the teacher wants.
Then we had one and a half hour break before lectures started, in which we did a negative brainstorm and then mirrored those to positive things. For example, at the negative brainstorm we figured that we couldn't make the game too hard, and we mirrored that to making it simple and doable, seeing as children often quit things they can't win.
Introduction to Scrum
Sadly, we failed. But the point to this all was to show that you should make prototypes during the process, and not just place the marshmallow on top at the end. We didn't do that, though! We just had no idea how to make a proper construction x)
Design Science
After that, we had a workshop Design Science. We had a lecture about that just yesterday, but like I said back then it was still rather confusing. Now it's pretty clear to me, though. They told us what our research is supposed to look like. It's really customer orientated, as you make an empathy map and then a point of view out of those.
An empathy map, which is shown above, is what you're supposed to make with information you get from the consumer. Now, we didn't get to do that just yet, but this one was made following our own thoughts on the target-group and was meant as a practice, since the workshop was meant to show us how exactly everything worked. You have six boxes, one 'hear' in which you put what everyone else says about the target group, like their parents or friends. Then there's 'think & feel', in which you put everything that's important to the group, what they think about often and what they have strong feelings towards and what they worry about. There's 'see' which is about the group's environment mostly, what the market offers and who their friends are. Then there's 'say & do', which tells about the group's behaviour towards others, their appearance and their attitude in public. Finally there's 'pain', which is what causes the group pain and also their fears are supposed to be in there. It also shows the obstacles they face and what causes them frustration. And then there's 'gain', which shows what they strive for, what they need, and how they measure their successes.
When you finish several empathy maps, you figure out the most important objectives for them to use your product, in our case why they would play a game. You figure this out using the previously made maps.
You can never make a product that covers all those possible motivations, though, so you have to choose the most important ones yourself. Once you have all this information about your target group and what drives them to use your product, you can start actually thinking of a concept of the product. And then, of course, you have to make a prototype. This is more design than it's production. It's a paper prototype, though, and you show it to your target group and the client to see if it's to their liking. With their feedback, you start another iteration. Then you can decide whether you need more information about your target group, you can edit the concept and the design to make it more to the liking of all parties involved, and then you ask for feedback again.
More Scrum
After this workshop, we had half an hour break before we started our final lecture of the day. This focused more on Scrum and how it worked, and we learned that each iteration has to start with a sprint planning meeting. This takes quite some time to do, but it's the meeting in which you create the product backlog and sprint backlog. The product backlog includes all products that have to be made, for example you need a code for a game, and characters and audio. Then the sprint backlog divides those products in tasks, which you write down as well. You have to order everything according to importance.
Once all tasks are written down, everyone that's working on the project can look at the tasks that need to be done at any given time and decide which one they'll do. Then that one moves to 'in progress', and to 'done' when it's finished. That's when the product owner can do a quality check.
I guess I forgot to mention that projectmanagers won't really be projectmanagers this time around, but product owners and scrum masters instead. That wasn't really all that important for me, though, seeing as I already got my points for projectmanagement this year. Either way, the product owner retains contact with the client and makes sure the product's quality is alright, and the scrum master makes sure that everyone is working together properly. The rest of the project group is the scrum development team, though our product owner and scrum master are included in that as well.
We also learned that each day is supposed to start with a meeting in which each project member tells the others what they've done the previous day, what they're planning on doing today and any problems they've encountered. And that at the end of each iteration, we need to have two meetings: a sprint review meeting, which is essentially testing the prototype, and a sprint retrospective meeting, which is looking back on the sprint and looking at what went well and what didn't. And then, of course, you try to do better the next sprint.
To practice the progress of a sprint planning meeting, we were asked to write down what you need to have to create a house, and then add the tasks necessary to that. We did make something out of it, but it was really hard as neither of us really had any idea how a house is made x).
The end of the day
After all this we were allowed to go home, though I stayed a bit longer since it was raining! When I got home, however, I wrote down some possible tasks since I figured that's what we'll be doing tomorrow. And I fixed the site that I made during our previous project, since I have my production assessment on that Friday. :x
Today was a very educative and productive day, I'd say!
I might not write tomorrow, since we're going to a restaurant with our community, but I will definitely be back on Friday. :)
No comments:
Post a Comment