Review on Production & Performance (Day 21)

Assignment 4.1: Weekly Journal

*Weekly Readings: Chapters 7-9 Agile Game Development with Scrum

Chapter 7: Video Game Project Planning – Reviewing this chapter took quite a while since it contains lots of information that focuses on how to schedule and plan within agile management. The chapter talks about the stages of sprint, which are Concepts, Pre-production, Production, Post-production, and finally Mixed stages. Continuing through with the lessons, it teaches us a little more on Sprint production with different challenges that would greatly interrupt the flow rate of work. The chapter also goes through buffering some of the strategies with each task such as feedback reviews, lean production methods, and improving cycle time.

Chapter 8: Teams– Now we get into how teams are supposed to cooperate and communicate with everyone on the project. It goes through how different teams follow through scrum practices and principals such as Cross-discipline, Self-management, Self-organization, and True leadership. Cross-discipline teams are able to deliver a working product that brings some value to both the stakeholders and customers. Self-Management teams are also like the Cross-Disciplinary teams, with each individual managing their own workload and prioritizes the work among themselves based on what needs to get done and how it benefits the product. Self-organization teams are geared towards having people with specific roles to fill within production and to work out the chemistry to sort out the poor performers from the diligent workers. Finally, the chapter covers a few detailed features of being a team Lead such as mentoring, design and planning, and reviews.

Chapter 9: Faster Iterations – The main term of iterations is to go through the initial version of a work and continue revising until it shows signs of improvements. While the Agile goal is to deliver work fast, the workload is increased and intense, which would lead to burning out early. The method certainly has its good points such as less distractions and getting some learning feedbacks to discovering other solutions that would improve the quality of the work. The chapter covers through some of these iterations, such as estimating and measuring the timebox for which an assignment can fit into the scheduled production time. Some of the other features in this chapter includes QA testing & playthroughs, build configurations, and managing revision controls.

*Weekly Production Review

During Monday’s meeting, the team has received their feedback review from the other production teams of the school. So far, most of the feedback had been harsh, with some of the comments as not interesting enough or lacks the aesthetic art style the game is supposed to be as. The team didn’t really seem to care though since their product has made a lot of progress since the last time they had a review. As a producer, I have the upmost expectations from the Team Lead to continue supporting his group and managing the project as he’s been doing since the start of the semester. Although he may come off as a hard person to communicate and tends to be strict, this is because he’s focused on completing the tasks before the end of this sprint. While I try to assist others the best I could, the lead has told me to not disrupt their work, as they’re only a few individuals working for him and that any distractions will cause them to lose focus. However, I was asked by those few individuals for research and support over their work, so I still believe I’m doing my best to assist their assignment completion.

The only part I find vexing about their production work is the lack of logging in their working hours. While they have a shared responsibility to getting the assignment turned in (and doing a fantastic job) they’re not utilizing the most out of the Axosoft feature by logging in their hours after production day (Fridays). I then realize they only log in the hours right before Sunday night, when the weekends are over. Even if the team lead is a hard person to approach during these crunch times, I’m going to try and convince him to change the way his team will need to use Axosoft from now on. This is to perform an accurate estimate of how much work is done and measure the Working Velocity correctly for their sprint. Otherwise, it sets a bad example of how an Agile sprint production is done.

I have no doubts that the team will accomplish their assigned goals by the end of this sprint and will continue this quickly and efficiently.