As the title of this post suggests, our project has officially been green-lit by our professor to move into full production. This new sprint is our first crack at running a production schedule, rather than something that is more conceptual. Now it's my job to try and shape what we do into something that resembles an assembly line, rather than an amalgamation of random bits that need to work together. Our game project is fully planned with just some minor tweaks that need solving.
Perhaps the most pressing matter is still our product backlog, which is a mess of old and new ideas, in no particular order. The lead team is planning to meet early this next week to create a backlog based on our current feature list and plans, order it, and break up the large 'epics' into sprint-sized stories. I don't see it being a particularly easy task but it's something that is necessary for streamlining our production cycle.
One thing I would like to talk about here is that a met with the production professor this last sprint. It was a fairly short meeting but there was some valuable incite into how I can improve as a project manager. In my last blog post, I had said that my team was running smoothly with very minimal interference by me. Unfortunately (and fortunately in another way), that was something of an error on my part. This last sprint ended in a sprint failure as much of the work was put off till the last day. There are different issues that need to be addressed. My meeting with the professor made that clear. He showed me a way on pineapple to track people's work by the day and suggested a pay closer attention to any patterns that seem to emerge. He's right that if I had been doing that before, I would have noticed that not enough was being done early in the sprint. This week, I've given myself specific tasks throughout the week to check on the work and hours of each member on my team. I'll likely jot down notes on what I see so that I can compare each week for similar patterns.
The last thing I want to write here is about the title for our project. Through much battle between the team members, and leads between each other, the name of our game is now "Adventure into The Gun Galaxy!" We chose this name because it sells the campy, pulp sci-fi feel, while also presenting one of our game's main features - guns. We hope that people will respond well to this new name.