Review on Production & Performance (Day 34)

Assignment 6.1: Weekly Journal

*Weekly Readings: Chapters 14-16 of Agile Game Development with Scrum

Chapter 14: The Myths and Challenges of Scrum – This was one of the most insightful chapters as it goes in depth with some of the “Silver Bullet” Myths of Scrum that happens nearly all the time during production work. There is no absolute problem solving towards every problem, but it does require a supportive team and leads to correct any problems within the development phases and mitigate the problems by planning out procedures ahead of time. Some of the trade-offs to these myths is that they are experiences to learn from these trial & error scenarios, but its best to learn from these lessons before encountering them. One of the worst possible scenarios within production that has ever occurred is when some of the more valuable people will refuse to work in an agile environment and leave because of possible changes in their position. Most of the issues lies within the work environment and how easily these changes can lower workplace morality and degrade work quality.

Chapter 15: Working with a Publisher – This chapter was a little bit interesting, seeing as how they try to examine publisher/developer’s relationship in the same scrum environment. While developers are trying their best to maintain their agile schedules, contracted publishers are likely to make last minute changes because they’re not satisfied with the product quality. This is also a problem since they hold leverage against the contracted team with signed documents that allow them to dictate what should be built in the game. This is due to the lack of cooperation and trusts within the two parties. In fact, publishers are not a big fan of Agile development, seeing as how studios can iterate the project for a long time and lose out on money. Same goes for the developers as they see publishers changing their scope and often lead to unpaid, overtime work. Open communications are made to prevent such issues from arising in the first place. Such methods will allow both parties to issue priority work and create firm shipping dates for better product results. It’s a steep road for both publishers and developers to collaborate on projects, but then the results turn out well in the end.

Chapter 16: Launching Scrum – The final chapter goes through the adoption of Scrum through three stages; Apprentice, Journeymen, and Master stages. Each of these stages provide an experience through the development of Scrum that will initially create the work, breaking it down to smaller tasks, and commit towards improving the value of the team. There are a lot of unique experiences and strategies that the author passes down through these stages such as the split & seed/reform method where greater teams are often split into smaller parties to improve development, but the drawback is that it becomes less effective.

*Weekly Production Review

Not much has changed during the past week since I last spoke with my team. While I’ve been trying to put together a quick PR about my team, they’ve been working on getting their latest build together for the Alpha-build review that was on Friday. Since then, I’ve been seeing some issues occur a few times such as their source control locking out on a few members unable to push their work. There was also the problem where the online multiplayer feature had glitches showed up on their review day. However, they managed to fix it all up before the weekend ended. I personally do not trust source control websites because they often crash during the most important times of production reviews. I only advise them to switch to Google Drive for their saved work.

Production aside, they’ve been working pretty well on their own and making sure to expedite their work as efficiently as they make it out to be and catching up to their estimated work hours on their Scrum. I’ve at least gained some first-hand experiences that my team had problems with their programming and source controls but was flexible enough to sort these issues out, making the gameplay a little smoother.