15 Practices to Improve Iterations/Sprints

Gear Up! Advanced Game Development Practices has 15 practices alone on how to improve the effectiveness and productivity of your iterations/sprints.


Burndown your PBIs Measure your daily progress adding features into the game
Estimate in Days not Hours If hour estimates are too precise, don’t use them
Feature Flow Cards Manage workflow on a cross-discipline feature that requires some hand-offs
Fix-it Friday Manage debt by setting aside every Friday to fix, polish and fine tune the game
Iteration Reviews Celebrate the amazing accomplishments of the team
Priority Status Board Create transparency for iteration priorities
Sprint Day Review, retrospect and plan the next sprint in a day!
Swim Lanes Create, visualize and track a work category for solving urgent requests
The "Done Done" Column Elevate the role of quality in your iterations
The Build Health Radiator A simple physical device that radiates the state of the current build and raises an alarm when the build is broken for too long
The Build Monkey Use a clean PC to firewall changes before you release it to others
Track Emergent Work Don’t just track the work you predicted, but also what you didn’t
Use WiP Limits Limit the amount of work in progress so teams can focus on getting things done
War Room Set aside a space where teams can host their iteration artifacts and daily standup meetings
WiP Tokens A simple visual way to protect specialists from being overwhelmed

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Loaf of Questionable Freshness

Image
Summary - Some practices are meant to catch problems before they get too far. Don't make the mistake of having these practices humiliate or punish people.  Assume they are human, didn't mean it and have some shared laughs. --- The practices collected in Gear Up! come from decades of experience, some painful, some that turned out fun in the long run. One such practice called “Lighten the Mood” came from the development of Midtown Madness in the late nineties at Angel Studios when we were struggling to keep the game from being continually broken. Often when a commit breaks a game, it's because someone ignored established testing practices.   We didn’t have extensive build testing automation then. We had a dedicated PC, the “build monkey,” where any change committed had to be tested separately following every commit. Verifying the build on the build monkey could be a tedious task. Some people occasionally found excuses to skip it, sometimes to the detriment of the team. ...
Read more

The Story Behind Gear Up!

Image
Gear Up launched today! Wow...seven years almost to the day since my first book.   What took so long?  Well, cranking out 250 pages of text, illustrations and doing most of the proofreading on my own took years.  I'm proud of the result, but it was a "check off the bucket list item" thing at the time. This book was different.  First, let's visit its origin. Developers always ask me “we’re having problems doing X with methodology Y, what should we do?”. My first answer is always “What have you tried?”.  I ask this because the best solutions usually come from the people doing the work and experimenting with new practices, not following so-called “best practices”. “Best practices” implies there are none better. Practices will always change as do our players, technology and markets. This leads to experimental practices, where teams explore ways of adapting to change and improving how they work together. Thinking about that original question, I think of al...
Read more

23 Practices to Improve Small Team Culture

Image
Gear Up! Advanced Game Development Practices  has 23 practices that improve team bonding and communication. 360 Reviews Have teams review their peers frequently and regularly 20% Time Set aside some time to explore and re-focus Ask Powerful Questions Ask questions that drive thoughtful answers Demo Iteration Energize a team by letting them have some fun on their own Effective Postmortems Diagnose issues that have emerged and provide a clear plan to fix them Elephant In the Room Identify the biggest problem quickly and address it Free Day/Free Week Reward hard work with creative time Group Confession Encourage the team to be more open, less proud and more willing to learn from fails Lighten the Mood Don’t punish people for making mistakes - It’s how we often learn Love Card Wall Build team culture by sharing moments of respect and appre...
Read more