Project set-up: Product backlog
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Welcome to my first blog post! I am the manager and producer of group Rakshasa. Our current objective is to create a 2D shoot ‘em up game working in the Scrum framework. We decided to use the “Fear is in me” concept document as the basis and we are striving to make the best our of it. The game is about little girl trying to overcome her nightmares. In her dreams she is lost in the forest and fights evil creatures with just a flashlight. The very first task for the group was creating a product backlog – a list of literally everything that is needed in the product. It is a tool that somewhat resembles activity list, because team members can pick a few items from it and then set them as their sprint’s goals. It also provides a quick outlook about the project’s progress as all the features that have been produced, implemented, tested and approved are marked as completed. Despite the fact that I am the one who is responsible for the backlog and keeping it up to date, I gathered my team and we worked on it together. It is very important that everyone takes part in it, since a single person would never be able to think of every minor component, especially outside of his or her main field. This is why we all cooperated and minimized the risk of missing out on something. We started with extracting main artefacts, like a main character from the concept document and creating a scope for them. Then we further divided them into small features, like movement or weapon aiming and assigned them into 3 types: code, art and sound.  We continued doing that with every element in the concept document, but we also had to add several items that were not contained, like menus. To keep the document clearly readable, each feature is listed individually and the types are colour-coded. Besides the names, the backlog includes several additional columns: potential level of risk that each feature can carry and how likely it is to fail, priority level, ranging from High Alpha to Low Beta, deadline and a check field. Worth mentioning, the backlog is not set in stone; in fact it is constantly updated and in accordance to agile methodology everything is flexible and prone to change.  |