What’s a QA team without a spec?

Elder Game: MMO game development » What’s a QA team without a spec?

What’s a QA team without a spec? A goddamned nuisance and a waste of time, that’s what.

Man I hate when QA people do their jobs without specs! It’s so irritating. When Asheron’s Call 2 launched, there were thousands of outstanding bugs in the QA database that we opted not to fix before launch. Sounds bad, doesn’t it? But if you looked at them, you’d understand. Hundreds of them were bugs about how buildings were floating 2 virtual inches off the ground; if you zoomed the camera down to the floor and looked up, you could see that these structures were very slightly hovering.

Tomb Raider: Underworld post mortem

Gamasutra - Features - Postmortem: Crystal Dynamics' Tomb Raider: Underworld

Very interesting article, mostly because Eric Lindstrom mentions a couple of good examples of anticipated risks which nevertheless became reality, regardless of mitigation efforts.

"It is particularly interesting to note that much of what went wrong in development involved pitfalls that we anticipated but still fell into despite our efforts to avoid them. It's important to note that most postmortems talk about "What Went Wrong" and not just "What We Did Wrong" because sometimes you make mistakes, but other times you suffer from acts of god and do your best to cope.

A Game Developer article last year ("What Went Wrong?" December 2008) specifically questioned why game development seems to make the same mistakes over and over. In light of that, some of the "wrongs" will be discussed in terms of how our methods to avoid known issues fell short."

Definition of impediments in SCRUM

Scrum Impediments

Laszlo Szalvay of Danube talking about "impediments" in the context of Scrum:

"In the Scrum method of agile development, a scrum impediment is defined as anything that stands in the way of a team's productivity. This can literally be anything, from a team member who isn't pulling his or her weight to an uncomfortably warm team room. But if it's keeping the team from working at optimal efficiency, it's an impediment.

Luckily, Scrum dedicates an entire role to the resolution of these impediments: the ScrumMaster. The ScrumMaster works in a variety of capacities, such as helping the Product Owner prepare the backlog or radiating Scrum artifacts, but the primary responsibility of a ScrumMaster is to remove scrum impediments and facilitate a highly performing team. To help the ScrumMaster achieve this, the team is responsible for communicating what barriers are impeding their progress. This occurs each day in the daily Scrum, when team members report on their accomplishments for the past 24 hours, goals for the next 24 hours, and what scrum impediments stand in their way. This systematized feedback loop ensures that a ScrumMaster always knows what is keeping the team from success and work to remove them."

Dealing with Conflict Avoidance Teams

Agile Blog: Role of Scrum Master - Dealing with Conflict Avoidance Teams

Have you come across teams where only a few speak and the rest listen ?

Have you seen any of your team members not sharing their thoughts or participating well during Scrum meetings, retrospectives or other activities ?

Have you come across any team where there is no conflict ?

Silent Teams
The teams where you don't see conflict, I would call them as "Silent teams" for the sake of this article are silent in speech, but not really silent in their mind. The people in this teams are like any other people but all their questions, frustrations, arguments everything is going only in their mind. They never speak up or discuss things in front of a group, especially if their ideas conflict with others. But there are chances that they go and share their frustrations with some one closer to them in the team during the cafe breaks or with any other close friend.