Jake Patton

As our team did not have any trained producers, it fell upon the discipline leads and I to manage the team's Agile processes and find a way of working that would fit our team. To that end, we consistently improved our methodologies each sprint, learning what worked best for our team as we made the game.

​

One example of how this constant improvement paid off was Sprint Planning. When we had our first Sprint Planning meetings, each discipline (art, programming, and design) would separate and come up with a list of features to complete that sprint, then a list of tasks with time estimates, and would ask questions of other disciplines as they came up. While this served us well at first, it had some significant issues. The leads of various disciplines didn't always know the priority of the other disciplines, leading to delays. Also, these meetings would often take too long, as one discipline would have to wait for information from another to finish their planning.

​

After some small modifications over the Proof of Concept and Vertical Slice milestones, I decided to reorganize the process. Instead of having discipline specific meetings, I lead a team-wide meeting in which we would create a comprehensive list of features and tasks we needed to complete. We would then as a team discuss which tasks were interdisciplinary, which could cause delays , and which had the highest priority. Then we would separate the tasks out into discipline specific lists and make task sticky notes with time estimates afterwords. After finishing this, I would create a calendar with each deliverable for the sprint placed the deadline for it to be completed, as determined by the leads and I. This process was quicker to complete than the old process, caused fewer delays, and improved communication between the different disciplines. Ultimately, we ended up using it for the remaining three milestones.