Mentoring day

Firstly, I want to say that I feel uncomfortable when I spend time organising instead of working.  It feels much more comfortable to spend time writing a sex scene than it does to write rules for sex scenes.  

After having just taken a fortnight out of production to do just that, spending more time on project management was kind of a scary prospect.

But...

So I started my day with a mentoring call from an expert in Jira, our new project management tool.

Like I said yesterday, I wasn't convinced that I'd set it up correctly over the weekend.  I had a feeling in my gut that I was setting us up for future problems.  The expert agreed, and explained why, and was able to show me a simpler and more effective way to set up the tool.

He also advised me to return to the discipline of dev sprints...but to do them properly this time.  (Veteran supporters will know that I experimented with dev sprints this year.  I think they were productive...but they ended up dragging on for months at a time.)

The expert advised me to start thinking and working in two-week dev sprints.  The end result of a sprint that short won't often be a release, but it should be an incremental improvement of some kind.  (Maybe a Beta, maybe just crossing a task off the Big Fucking List™.)

He was unequivocal about this; he thinks that adopting this discipline will speed up development of Female Agent.

Slow development is the game's biggest problem, so I'm going to try to faithfully follow his advice.  Imagine if it fucking works.  I spent today reconfiguring Jira in line with his suggestions, and planning the first 2-week sprint.

I was happy enough with my sprint plan, but Hyneman and Mano2 both felt that it was too much Crush and not enough team.  They suggested we add a simple feature (like more hometowns, or the In This Year content) into this sprint, in order to practice concurrent working (which is what the World Famous Game Designer advised me to do).

So we'll figure that out, and go firm on a sprint plan tomorrow.  See you then.  🤞🏻