Sprint 001
Added 2019-01-02 18:46:42 +0000 UTCIn an effort to speed up development, I’m experimenting with the Scrum of One technique invented by Alex Andrews.
Scrum is built around “sprints”, which are 1-4 week bursts of effort aimed at achieving a defined goal. The goal of Sprint 001 is to release version 1.4.
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In an uncharacteristic display of organisation, I spent today planning the sprint instead of jumping right into the nearest task. My goal was to itemise each remaining task and estimate how many pomodoros (a 25-minute block of focused time) it will take.
I think that there are 26 tasks remaining, containing a total of 154 pomodoros of work. I can reliably do 10 pomodoros per game dev day, meaning this sprint should take 16 dev days to complete.
Factoring in my other commitments gives us an estimated release date of Sunday Jan 27th for version 1.4 of Female Agent – about 3.5 weeks away. This is further out than I was hoping it would be, as usual. :-( I am trying this new technique to try and permanently improve my ability to estimate release dates.
This is the most scientifically I’ve ever tried to estimate a release date, so it will be interesting to see whether or not I can hit it. If this works, it could lead us to being able to correctly schedule releases in 2019. (Estimating the work accurately is the first step towards increasing the speed of the development cycle.)
For the rest of the sprint I’ll be doing Sprint Updates instead of Pomodoro Reports. In these, I’ll report the work that was done in the dev day, and let you know if I’m ahead of or behind schedule.
I’ve created a Trello board to keep track of the individual tasks. You can view it here. The idea is that tasks move through the three columns and into the “DONE” column as I tick them off.
We want faster development, so I have to try different things (or we’ll just always get the same results). At the end of this first sprint we will have a review, and you guys can let me know if this way is better than the old way.
First sprint day is tomorrow. Wish me luck!
Comments
I'll put this out once the XP popups are all in, so probably Friday or the weekend.
Crushstation
2019-01-09 21:48:09 +0000 UTCYou know what, I picked her thinking that you specifically would like her. :-D
Crushstation
2019-01-09 10:53:30 +0000 UTCYeah, sure thing, I'll get one out shortly.
Crushstation
2019-01-09 10:52:20 +0000 UTCGoood luck!!!
Toadsith
2019-01-06 01:00:29 +0000 UTCQuick Q: Will you be uploading a DevTest in the near future before the release? I'm quite keen to see what the changes are :D
Paul
2019-01-03 21:16:05 +0000 UTCIf we get more pictures like today's I think I can cope with just eating real tomatoes and looking at athletes.
Jumpy James Johnson Junior
2019-01-03 16:16:23 +0000 UTCThe dark day has come. Crushstation has finally run out of sexy tomato pictures.
The Magma Team
2019-01-03 01:57:51 +0000 UTCYou once said no more than 8 pomos a day because more made your work suffer. Maybe that's not the case anymore?
bsnick
2019-01-02 23:10:03 +0000 UTCnow comes the athletic porn. And since we have all the tomatoes on the eyes anyway ....
Falloutbabe
2019-01-02 21:54:49 +0000 UTCThanks for your answer, I get the idea ! Hopefully you guys all find your rhythm with this tasklist format. Keep up the good work ! :-)
elmagio
2019-01-02 21:44:04 +0000 UTCIs that means no more pomodoro porn? :(
Brzęczyszczykiewicz
2019-01-02 21:37:30 +0000 UTCGood luck buddy
Oswald Gonzalez Jr
2019-01-02 20:59:25 +0000 UTCHey El Mag! Very good observation, thanks for raising it. I think if you were to poll the helpers, they would tell you that they spend a lot of time waiting for me to task them with things. Getting more organised with the list of tasks will help me delegate better. I definitely intend to palm some of this stuff onto the others and deliver ahead of schedule. We'll see if I can pull it off. :-D That said, not everything can be delegated (sadly). 30 of the artwork pomos are based on an idea I had about how to speed up all future artwork production using a cool feature in Illustrator called "mesh objects". I'm going to see if I can make it work then push it out to V for execution, since she draws way better than me. More on that tomorrow.
Crushstation
2019-01-02 20:45:49 +0000 UTCstarts the countdown 25 ....
Falloutbabe
2019-01-02 19:39:22 +0000 UTCHey ! Just one thing I don't understand: As you pointed out yesterday, you have people helping you with the development of the game now. Yet, you seem to be calculating the ETA from the time it will take YOU to finish all those tasks. For example, 70 of the 156 estimated Pomodoros seem to consist of drawing artwork, wouldn't that be something that Victoria would be helping you with? Same with the coding focused tasks and Hyneman. So, are the others busy completing other tasks (for future versions, for example) or do they only help punctually and not on an ongoing basis?
elmagio
2019-01-02 19:01:34 +0000 UTCgood luck!)
Terebonkoff Game Studio
2019-01-02 18:50:04 +0000 UTC
