1st post – Managing and organising the product backlog
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These past two weeks me and my team have been working on developing a “shoot em up” game. We chose the concept document “Umibozu” which has a mysterious feeling as aesthetics. This is our first time developing a video game and each member finally has a chance to show their skills, which might be quite challenging since we have two and a half months to finish the game. My job is mainly to manage the team and to plan and organise the project work. This week I will talk about managing and organising the product backlog. This project had a requirement to use scrum method for managing the work. This is the first time for me working with this method and I did not know much how to actually use it. Although I have been studying about this, but I did not have any practical skills. Our teachers help us by giving a template and some examples, but it still needed to be filled and organised. We had certain requirements for Alpha and Beta sections of the game. I needed to write these down in the product backlog and prioritise. First of all I gathered my team and we discussed what features are needed for Alpha and Beta and then we prioritised. The mistake we made was that we were not so specific about features. For example I wrote “enemies” as one feature, but there should be written a specific enemy like enemy1, enemy 2 and etc. Another mistake I did was that I organised everything by two big section which were Alpha and Beta. In this case, the backlog was looking messy and not so clear for a team to find features. I was struggling with organising backlog until I had a meeting with a scrum master. Scrum master gave a good example how to organise the backlog. He advised to write features and under them to write assets which are needed for that specific feature. Then I coloured assets for a different fields like graphics and programming. At the end our backlog was looking nice, organised, and the team was satisfied with that.
There are still many things to add for Beta section, because we are not completely sure what specific assets we will need for later. This can always be adjusted according to feedback we receive after testing our game in Pre-Alpha and Alpha presentations.  |
