 Product backlog
During this past week, I had been working extensively with the product backlog for our project. The backlog is where all of the tasks or assets that need to be completed during the project are stored. You can add to the backlog as the project progresses, so it is never truly finished, but it is important that it is well structured for the project to run smoothly.
We use a google spreadsheet for our backlog, that very much resembles an excel document. The benefit of using google spreadsheet is that it is accessible online so that all the group members can view and add tasks to the backlog.
During the earlier weeks of the project me and the designer in our group had developed the backlog together. However, we received feedback that it lacked a lot in structure, and were missing some important things like risk evaluation and deadlines for all of the assets. These were issues that we needed to fix before the upcoming Friday. After some rearrangement of the work we decided that I would alone be responsible for restructuring the backlog.
What I did was that I spent a lot of time categorizing all the assets so that tasks considering the avatar for instance would not blend together with the ones concerning an enemy. I did this mainly so that you would get a better overview of what needs to be done. It also makes it easier to add new assets to the backlog if you can put them into their corresponding category. Doing this also makes it easier to see how close a feature is to being finished, and by extension, how close it is to being implemented.
Once I had made clear categories I started to add deadlines to all of our tasks. Some of the assets lacked deadlines even though they were already completed. And some of them simply had the date of the alpha as a deadline. I cleaned this up, and spread out the deadlines more evenly across the following weeks, I also added the date of completion as a “deadline” for the finished assets.
I also color-coded everything in our backlog per type (code, art, sound etc.) and whether it should be finished for the Alpha, Beta, or the final version of the game.
/Lucas Ingvarsson
About Lucas Ingvarsson
2016 Project Management
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