{"id":477,"date":"2010-04-01T08:38:14","date_gmt":"2010-03-31T22:38:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.doolwind.com\/blog\/?p=477"},"modified":"2010-04-01T08:38:14","modified_gmt":"2010-03-31T22:38:14","slug":"review-certified-scrummaster-for-video-game-development-with-clinton-keith","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.doolwind.com\/blog\/review-certified-scrummaster-for-video-game-development-with-clinton-keith\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Certified ScrumMaster for Video Game Development with Clinton Keith"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>In the days leading up to GDC this year Clinton Keith<\/a> held a ScrumMaster course specifically for video game development.\u00a0 I attended the course and in this blog post I share my experiences with a brief review for anyone thinking of attending or sending some of their developers to attend.<\/p>\n

The course runs over two full days and was the first course of this length where I didn\u2019t fall asleep.\u00a0 The content was of a high quality and was kept interesting with lots of interactive tasks and small group discussions.\u00a0 Clinton began with a great overview of Scrum and then dug deep in to the details, explaining all concepts in great detail, without bogging down in minutiae.\u00a0 While there was a slight programmer emphasis he covered all facets of game development.<\/p>\n

Clinton has a lot of experience with general game development and is a pioneer with implementing Scrum in game development.\u00a0 His stories were not only interesting but served as a great way to show how Scrum is being used in the real world.\u00a0 He has worked with some big studios including CCP (creators of Eve Online) and Bioware.\u00a0 This gives him both credibility and a great insight into how large companies have made successful games using Scrum.<\/p>\n

The last part of the second day was spent simulating a handful of sprints to get a feel for how the interactions worked between ScrumMaster, product owner and the team.\u00a0 The use of lego to create a small world was surprisingly similar to software development and served as a great way to simulate a small development cycle.\u00a0 This brought the whole group together and let them experience the realities of working with Scrum in a group of people.\u00a0 It allowed us to put into practice what had been learnt over the past two days.<\/p>\n

An obvious benefit is the certification received at the end of the course.\u00a0 However more important was the knowledge gained during the course.\u00a0 I had a fairly good understanding of Scrum before the course however this helped to fill all the holes and even correct a number of misconceptions I had.\u00a0 There are a lot of resources on the net and in books that can teach the basics of Scrum however I found that the interactive and hands-on nature of the course taught me things I would never have picked up through reading or trying to implement Scrum in a vacuum within my own team.\u00a0 This is the primary reason I would recommend the course to anyone looking to adopt Scrum in the software development team.\u00a0 Most people admitted to using a \u201cversion\u201d of Scrum which by the end of the course proved to not have some of the essential ingredients.<\/p>\n

One of the great points of the course was the high level of interactivity.\u00a0 We could ask questions at any time (which people did) and Clinton would often integrate his answer into the rest of his talk give context rather than a simple answer.\u00a0 He was happy to answer the hard questions about Scrum including where it has its problems and where we are likely to run into trouble.<\/p>\n

I highly recommend the course to any lead\u2019s or project managers.\u00a0 While the cost of $1500 is fairly high (it’s the standard cost of any ScrumMaster course) it pays for itself in the payoffs you will experience within your team.\u00a0 It\u2019s an enjoyable two days where a lot is learnt and most will be inspired to fix the problems with the way their teams are managed.<\/p>\n

Have you participated in a certified ScrumMaster course?\u00a0 Have you attended one of Clinton\u2019s courses or talks?\u00a0 What do you think of Scrum and its relevance to video game development?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the days leading up to GDC this year Clinton Keith held a ScrumMaster course specifically for video game development.\u00a0 I attended the course and in this blog post I share my experiences with a brief review for anyone thinking of attending or sending some of their developers to attend. The course runs over two Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[33],"tags":[112,37,39,65],"class_list":["post-477","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-game-development","tag-game-development","tag-game-programming","tag-gdc","tag-scrum"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pgEc5-7H","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.doolwind.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/477","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.doolwind.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.doolwind.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.doolwind.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.doolwind.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=477"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.doolwind.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/477\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.doolwind.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.doolwind.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.doolwind.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}