Just a very short one to address a peeve of mine guys.
It seems to me that every time we see CCP release the small but great updates such as the recent D-scan changes or other UI tweaks there is a outcry of similar complaints which follow somewhere along the lines of “Why did CCP focus on this when their resources could have been better used elsewhere?!” followed by some sort of obligatory bitter mention of Incarna or DUST 514. Comments like this have always frustrated me slightly as I’ve always been under the impression that it’s not really that simple, but as I’ve always said, I’m not a games developer so I decided to explore how the development process at CCP works and see if this really is the case.
The CCP development team work with what is known as Agile Scrum; a project management model common place in the software development world. Without going too far into detail Agile Scrum focuses on short periods of time known as sprints, which very specific goals set for the end that time period. Agile Scrum works towards a final product by adding small pieces to yesterday’s work aiming for tomorrows targets, and this can sometimes result in certain developers waiting on others to complete their tasks before being able to progress.
I managed to have a short chat with CCP_Fozzie and got a very brief insight into the world of CCP development.
So I understand you guys run Agile Scrum at CCP?
We run Agile Scrum, with several teams working on EVE features most teams work in either one week or two week sprints we’ll always have a set of larger features that the team is working on, but one of the great things about “little things” changes like a smaller balance change or say the Amazon menu hack that just hit sisi is that those tasks can fit into gaps when one or two team members may be blocked by something else for a short time so we’ll usually keep a backlog of things we’d like to do that don’t take many people to make sure that nobody is ever left twiddling their thumbs,
Is it not as simple as applying the workforce of the developers twiddling their thumbs to aid the developers having issues?
generally it isn’t, as with programming tasks there’s a lot of diminishing returns from throwing more people at a specific part of a problem, sometimes there will be problems that are more appropriate for being attacked by large numbers of people but in those cases we need to weigh the cost of using those programmer hours on getting around the issue against all the other things they could be doing it’s often a matter of making optimal use of resources
So next time you find yourself about to state that the latest update was a waste of CCP’s time try and bear in mind that it’s very possible that the update is the result of downtime from a larger project and to send those resources elsewhere would have been the larger waste of CCP’s time.
Just a little insight for you and I alike.
~ Bo Jangles
