September 30, 2008
Long overdue
So the title of this blog is slowly become very wrong and I apoligise for that, I just can’t really talk about Dragonlings much, and I have been working on other things that just don’t belong here. To fix this problem I have started a new blog that I hopefully will be posting in more often at choosemyreality.wordpress.com. I messed up and lost my usual chooseareality name to not paying attention to what happens when you delete a blog from another account. (I don’t get it and it is gone forever! 
) Not a biggie, just had to reword my usual name a bit.
Hopefully I can start making some posts now that I have a much broader subject matter to attack. Namely anything that is catching my attention at the moment. 
May 22, 2008
Talking about Scrum
Ok, so I am going to be doing a presentation at work about Scrum and how we can use it to manage our projects, or at least as an alternative to our current method.
Wait! I know what does this have to do with Dragonlings? Well, I am using a solo Scrum to keep things on track with Dragonlings and I have used a lot of what I have learned personally and applied it to my proposed methods at work.
Oh, and this is my blog so I can talk about what I want! =)
I am doing this presentation and have about 20 slides so far that I plan on showing. They are a collection of talking points that I want to discuss in more detail and also ideas of how we can use Scrum and our existing processes, which I have to admit are leaning too heavily toward design up front to make me comfortable.
Almost every example I can find applies Scrum to programming, but I am trying to make the argument that we can apply it to any project that IT has to accomplish. This should work for the most part from everything I have read, and I have read a whole lot.
The biggest questions I have right now is about the programming group though. I want to talk a little about the engineering practices that the programmers should think about doing to make Scrum successful for our projects. The problem is that once I start to go into those practices the com and networking groups may start to see that I am really just presenting a programming framework and trying to make it fit them. In the past someone did a presentation on MSF and they had similar problems with the non-programmers because of the software focus that MSF has.
I am afraid that without the engineering practices like Test Driven Development (TDD) and constant refactoring the attempts to do Scrum just won’t work. I also would love to try pair programming and having teams working on a project instead of individuals each working on one application.
Of course making things worse, I am just a Programmer Analyst II here, above me are the Senior Programmer, a Supervisor, and a Director of IT. I am at the bottom and trying to make changes that will ripple up to the top and I have to say that it is going to be a uphill battle. Time to go slay a few gant charts! CYA!
May 2, 2008
Project Tracking
I have starting managing Dragonlings using Fogbugz, a project management and bug tracking program, and I will say that it is great. I had no idea how helpful and polished it would be. The ship date confidence distribution really tells me if I am just fooling myself about when I will get a sprint done.
Here is the chart:
I have been a fan of Joel Spolsky for a really long time now, but I had never actually tried any of the software that his small company in New York makes.
I love reading his articles when they talk about development and his ideas about how you should treat a programmer. I have a list of rules he created posted on the wall in my cubical and I try to encourage my employers to implement as many of those rules as possible to help encourage quality software, low turnover and great people that “get things done“.
Oh and it is free for up to two users as a Start Up version. I would have to say that that price worked out perfectly for me!
So if you want to try out a neat program and need to manage a project I recommend that you give it a try. I love it and it has only been two days.
On a side note I promise I will post about Dragonlings soon, I am having a hard time figuring out what to do next and I need some ideas about what would be the best possible thing to design next to make sure this game is going to be fun.
April 18, 2008
Scrum (No! It isn’t the stuff floating on top of the pond)
I have been heavily researching, reading, putting together presentations, and using every extra minute at work to put together a presentation on Scrum.
Scrum is a project management framework that has been around for about a decade. It an agile methodology created to help deal with complex, unpredictable projects. For example making a MMORPG game. (I will admit that in the game programming field this has only gained traction in the last several years, from what I can tell from Gamasutra.)
In the past I used XP (Extreme Programming), which is another agile methodology, to run a project where I was debugging a really large application that was written by someone else. It worked really great! In fact so great that I was layed off soon after I finished since it was stable and they had slowly been eliminating all in house programming till it was just me.
I really like it though and thought it really was one of the best ways I have ever run a project. Every since then I have wanted to try it again.
That was over six years ago and now I am working for a government agency and, as I have mentioned, on a independent game. I have tried from the start of Dragonlings to use Scrum to run my project, and for the most part is has allowed me to keep my focus, despite a two week delay when my home pc died. I am convinced once again that Agile Methodologies are the way to go, at least most of the time, and I will do everything I can to make them an option for pursuing projects where I work.
After that I will tackle introducing TDD (Test Driven Development) to everyone. Yeah I know, I am crazy to even try to do so much, but I think it is fun trying to change things… so there! =P
