Blog Post 2

 I believe that in terms of work completed, Sprint 2 could have been a lot more efficient. There were many issues that I as the producer encountered. There were also many issues with our production cycle that had I been better at my role, I would have been able to prevent.

For this sprint, I should have had many more cards written and prepared for the beginning of the sprint kickoff. As noted by Dan, the Trello backlog that I was in charge of did not have a clear set of cards that were necessary for us to complete in order to have a finished product at the end of the fifth sprint. Instead, there were a small amount of cards that were very vague and only provided a general idea of what features my team wanted to implement. I learned two main things from this kickoff. The first is that if I had more cards prepared for the kickoff, there would have been a much better sense of structure to our development over the course of the sprint. The other thing that I learned is that having the cards prepared ahead of time would have allowed me to think about the content of the cards, and how long each card might really take. 

The amount of time that each card took was not something that I had accounted for, even though it was a mistake I had made in the previous sprint. The cards that I wrote for Sprint 2 were too vague and too broad in scope. I think that those two issues alone slowed down how much work my partners could do, because it forced them into a position where they had to consider how much work to actually do for each card rather than having me determine it ahead of time.

A good example of this issue was shown to me in my own cards that I had to complete. The work that I completed was the creation of a security guard who patrols an area, and the creation of the main menu. I had begun work on the inventory system, but I underestimated the depth of the issue because it was all condensed into one card. In reality, it should have been at least two cards, because I would need to create and set up scriptable objects for each item, then have an array that would store the scriptable objects.

Although the cards that I wrote could have been better, I feel that there could have been much more work completed across the board. Amongst my group, one of my partners only completed a simple movement system and added a quick blurb about how to move the character in a tutorial screen. The other one was able to get a fair amount of work completed by creating the first level of the game and creating prefabs for all of the items. 

Overall, although there was not as much work completed as I would have liked or anticipated, I believe that with a new mindset around the specificity of my cards, we can pick up much more momentum and complete work at a much faster pace.

As a producer, the main thing that I learned over the course of this sprint and the previous sprint was that I need to actively manage how much work should be done by my partners and by when. Initially, I felt that taking a more hands off approach in order to let my group mates work in a relaxed environment would help promote more work. However, I have learned that I need to push deadlines on them that end before the sprint ends. 

Although we have completed a decent amount of work, all three of us usually started work later than we should have. The work was not particularly difficult–in fact, it was on the contrary. But, because we started the work late, it became difficult for me to assign more cards and allow us to increase our rate of work completion. 

This upcoming sprint and each following one, I plan on giving very clear instructions on when I want work done based on how big the card is, and I plan on assigning more cards as the sprint progresses so that there is never a moment in which we do not have a card that we are actively working on.