Unity5 development team has gamified its development cycles adding a fun element that has produced greater collaboration, creativity and productivity.
Agile methodology is a popular approach to project management that emphasises flexibility, collaboration, and continuous improvement. We use this methodology when developing our SaaS Zatpark platform. But what happens when you combine Agile with the excitement of gaming? You get a team that is motivated, engaged, and having fun! This is exactly what our Agile team has done by gamifying our sprints.
You might now be wondering, ‘What is a sprint?’. Development sprints are time-limited development periods, typically lasting a few weeks. Our team plans, develops, and reviews our work during each two week sprint cycle, focusing on delivering specific Zatpark features. This type of incremental development means we progress our updates quickly while remaining adaptable.
The idea of gamifying our sprints came from one of our team members, who is an avid Pokémon fan. We all loved the idea and decided to put it into practice.
If you don’t know about the Pokémon game, the primary goals of the game are to capture and train a team of creatures known as Pokémon. You challenge other trainers, completing the Pokédex and ultimately becoming the Pokémon Champion.
So, we now name each sprint after Pokémon characters. Our game is to ‘catch’ the named Pokémon sprint when we complete it. It’s been a fantastic way to bring some fun and creativity to our work and boost productivity and team morale.
We developed an internal software app that automates the gamification process. The system displays a list of all the Pokémon sprints we have completed and tracks which ones we have ‘caught’. Once we finish a two-week sprint, we mark it as completed in the app, and if it’s a Pokémon we haven’t caught yet, we add it to our collection. It’s a simple but effective way to track our progress and celebrate our achievements.
The results have been fantastic! The team is more engaged and motivated than ever before. We eagerly anticipate each new two-week sprint, excited to catch the next Pokémon on our list. The gamification aspect has also injected a sense of camaraderie into our daily update meetings. We share our progress on the app, and everyone eagerly cheers as we ‘catch’ the Pokémon we completed.
Of course, gamifying our sprints doesn’t mean that we take our work any less seriously. We still prioritise our project goals and work diligently to achieve them. However, by infusing an element of fun and friendly competition, we’ve discovered that we can accomplish even greater results. Our team is more collaborative, creative, and productive than ever before.
Gamifying our two-week sprints by naming them after Pokémon and tracking our progress has been a tremendous success. It has injected new energy and excitement into our work, and we’re all eagerly looking forward to catching more Pokémon in the coming sprints. Who knows, maybe we’ll even catch them all!
If you’d like to join our dev team, take a look at our current roles. Come join the fun!
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