Hello again! This week’s blog post will mostly focus on management stuff, which I guess will mostly be enjoyed by people that love organizing everything. Otherwise, it’s probably going to be boring. So, just to say something about the status of our game: at the moment, we’re focusing on implementing everything we have before Monday, which will be our second milestone: the Beta.
I think my group is doing a pretty good job at keeping track of everybody’s work and during the span of time we spent working together, we all kind of established a way of keeping everybody updated as soon as every task is done. It wasn’t very easy in the beginning, but as we kept working together, it just felt natural to want everybody on the same page.
How do we do it? We usually have a Facebook chat going on, where we discuss anything related to the game or management things, while at the same time using a slack channel to write down all of our updates, reminders, important information and so on. It has been really good to have all the important information we need on Slack, as Facebook makes it hard to find specific info while having to scroll 300 times. So, what happens every day now, is that everybody writes exactly what they’ve worked on during the day or what they’ve added in the Unity collab, this way everybody is updated and we can avoid that weird and awkward feeling of not knowing what’s going on.
About our Scrum meetings, we were recommended to hold our Sprint Planning on Monday and our Sprint Review on Friday. We decided to have both on Monday.
My group and I talked about this together, and discussed everybody’s working style. Now, some of my team members prefer to work on the weekends instead of others, that prefer working as soon as they get home after class.
Because of this, we thought it’d be best to review the whole week on Monday, instead of having to add individual tasks that were done during the weekend after Friday.
So what does that change for us? Nothing really. This way everybody is able to keep their own working style. Nobody is forced -ehm slaves ehm- to work on the weekend of course. But the ones who want to do that can add their hours and review their work on Monday. I guess it just felt more natural for everybody this way.
At the same time, you would think that it would take too long to have both Sprint Planning and Sprint Review on the same day, but I have to disagree. I think everybody wants to get it done as soon as possible because it’s mostly a drag -not for me, I love organizing everybody’s work, of course- and because of this, we manage to get it done pretty quickly. It usually takes us around 15-20 minutes for the Sprint Review, while it takes us up to 30 minutes for the sprint planning, based on tasks prioritization discussions.
Random example of one of our Sprint Reviews
I’ve been pushing a lot to keep the backlog updated regularly, thus making it easier to pick out tasks that have to be done before the various milestones.
So, why is all this stuff important? Well. I have a pretty amazing team, so I know that they would do a good job even without it. They would be the perfect example of Scrum’s self-organizing teams. They generally know what they have to do, and they get it done. My job is to make sure everything gets done the fastest and most efficient way, while keeping the quality up. I make sure the whole group is well organized, prepare individual worksheets that can be used to visualize better one’s tasks, as well as make sure everyone is on the same page. I also make sure nobody drowns in their own tasks to then feel overwhelmed, and I make sure we keep track of the final goals, without losing focus.
CHIARA LORUSSO 