This week has been quite a challenge for myself and the team. For starters, we didn't have much time in the beginning of the sprint to properly plan this week so a lot of it came together online (not the best way to plan a functional sprint). This was because our normal class time to plan was taken up by a mandatory team survey. We managed to set the sprint, but it was difficult to determine how much time people actually have to complete their tasks.
The largest issue we have all faced this week is our two day Fall break here at College. With all the extra time to put into work, a person might think that the sprint would be done with plenty of time to spare. This isn't the case. Between some team members taking off to see family and the other members having a completely different schedule, it seems that "Parkinson's Law" takes effect. For those unfamiliar with Parkinson's Law, it's the belief that work will expand to fill the time that is available to complete it. In my team's case (and, if I'm being honest, for myself as well), this has been completely true. I put off a lot of the work I would have normally done on the weekend. Even the work I did complete took me more time than it normally might have. Lack of urgency seems to be a primary cause. I'll say that even with these issues, my team is fairly confident that they will complete their sprint tasks on time.
As for my own work this week, I've been tasked with two primary jobs. The simple one is to price out t-shirts for our team so we can look good during presentation time. This shouldn't have taken as long as it has but there are so many options that I've found it hard to wade through it all to find both quality and a good price. I'm not even sure if I've succeeded on those but at this point, I've done my best.
The more pressing task was to create and post a more focused survey to our target market competition. This also has taken longer than expected but for a positive reason - I've gotten over 120 responses on it. The data all looks very promising to utilize but combing through it all has proven to be a time-consuming process. The survey itself used a few write-in spots. I felt this was necessary because I didn't want to limit response to what I believed was important to this market group. My intuition has *so far* proven to be correct on this. For example, I asked in the survey for people to rate the importance of Coop in their game purchase decisions. The results were mixed with a general tilt toward Coop being unimportant. However, when I look through the write-in responses and pick out key words for why people play or purchase these types of games, Coop gameplay seems to be more important than the other data would have led me to believe.
When dealing with these write-in responses, I've been doing a technique called "coding" (I'm honestly not sure if it actually has a name but that's what I've been told it's called). This is when I break down each response into key, or code, words. I then can compile those to paint a quantitative picture of these write-in responses. The example of "Coop" is one code word that I picked out in many responses.
This vacation has been really nice. I got a chance to breath before the next plunge. Thanksgiving is coming all too quickly when we demo our games. I'm really hopeful that my team can pull this off. For now, all I can do is get back to work.