Review on Production & Performance (Day 14)

Weekly Journal 2.1

*Weekly Readings: Chapters 5 & 6 Agile Game Development with Scrum

Chapter 5: User Stories – This chapter had me looking through each of the stories and made me think of personal values as a gamer. While it does focus on giving the audience a good description of a user perspective, it all boils down to how I would relate to the customers as a player. User Stories describes the type of user, what they want and why. It also helps to create a simplified description of a requirement when communicating a few said features to what players would want to experience in a game. One of the basic examples to use for a user story ask this line.

As a (Describe your status or role)

I Want (What do you want or desire)

So That (Why do you want it and what are the benefits)

This chapter basically making it look like user stories is a more useful technique to making work productivity easier as it helps to understand our featured goals that we would want to add in our sprint plans. I would find these techniques to be useful in future agile planning simply because it’s easier to input the features down as work items in the Agile software plan. However, these user stories are often over-exaggerated since they lack the proof of values to their arguments. Thinking logically, its best to refer to these stories as simple wishful thinking or tasks that we would want to accomplish. In agile teams, our goals is to work on objectives that we know can be accomplished without wasting too much of the stakeholders time and communications.

Chapter 6: Agile Planning – This chapter does it’s best to describe how agile planning can be used to measure the speed of a production team through user stories and turn it into working production backlog. This would require each story to be broken down into milestones or sprints, then it comes down to prioritizing and managing each task before production begins. Most of these examples can be found on Axosoft, where we measure the teams work velocity rate and then using those estimated figures to find out when they'll be done. Think of the planning phase as a manager task where the team’s activity is going off on estimates based on their user stories.

*Weekly Production Review

The team, Evil Bear Gaming LLC., seems to be doing well with meeting some of their objectives through each sprint on their current game, Looters of the Arcane. As of now, I’m still trying to remember everyone’s role in the production cycle and I will need to talk with them often if I want to get to know their personalities better. So far, their detailed game documentations seem to be on point, but I want them to keep updating their Axosoft more properly. While I know they’re busy with polishing up their previous assignments, if they’re working on assignments that are overdue from their prior sprints, they need to push their sprints to the next one so to avoid recording late hours. Respectively, I am thinking that I am not acting as a Producer, but rather as the scrum master in overseeing they complete their milestone goals. By next week, I will try to convince the team lead in letting me handle the Axosoft documentation and monitor the folks with priorities.

While they are an undermanned team consisted of 8 personnel’s, they see to it that they get their assigned work turned in for their results. I would like to push their agendas a little bit further so that they can get their assignments done earlier, but I’m still trying to figure out everyone’s work schedule that it may seem impertinent of me to ask of them to show more results. Earlier, I’ve tried requesting the publishing studio in charge of their team to move some more members to help takeaway some of the overbearing tasks they already have. However, the team lead didn’t want any more members on his team since its already too late in the sprint production to take in a new teammate to get them up to speed with their project. Overall, they’ve shown quite a lot of progress along with working together as a team and the game has come a long way from when it first began. If I am to process the workload delicately and efficiently, then we might be able to finish up our next sprint objectives, plus the ones from the prior sprints.

Their next sprint is all about finishing up one of their key levels and a couple of bug fixes towards their features. Since were going into the next sprint, I want to reach out to a few team members about what I could do to help alleviate some of the tasks to help meet their completion date on sprint production. This is a small group after all, so the best I can do for them is to find a way to help most of the members out the best I can without overworking them.