Articulating everyday actions: an activity theoretical approach to scrum

  • Authors:

  • Brian J. McNely;Paul Gestwicki;Ann Burke;Bridget Gelms

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, USA;Ball State University, Muncie, IN, USA;Ball State University, Muncie, IN, USA;Ball State University, Muncie, IN, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 30th ACM international conference on Design of communication
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

In this paper, we detail findings about the use of Scrum--a widely adopted agile software development framework--among a student game development team. Looking closely at six weeks of Scrum practices from a larger fifteen-week ethnography, we describe how Scrum strongly mediates everyday actions for the thirteen participants we studied. In analyzing our data, we deployed activity theory in concert with genre theory to better understand how participants repeatedly articulated and coarticulated finite, goal-directed, individual actions in the service of a broader, ongoing, shared objective. We offer, therefore, a way of understanding the Scrum process framework as a powerful orienting genre that facilitates collective development practice by stabilizing and intermediating a host of related, dynamic genres and artifacts.