What to do... what to do... what not to do

Earlier in this blog I mentioned that Space Combat Sim is being developed using at least the trappings of the Scrum methodology. I say the trappings because certain aspects of the method don't apply because A, I don't have a team to hold meetings with and B, the Scrum methodology seems to assume a 40 hour week of five 8 hour days. This is great for regular software! I love having 8 hour days. They certainly beat 10 and 12 hour days (grumble grumble.)

But I digress... one part of Scrum that we do use is the product backlog. It's essentially a glorified to-do list. A huge set of items to be created for the project with estimates for how long they'll take. Work from the list is batched together in units called sprints. The expectation that over the length of the sprint all of the selected tasks are to be done. In the real world I believe sprints are one or two weeks long, in school they're about a month. Anyway, if the to-do list for the sprint isn't empty when the time is up then there's a problem. Fortunately, due to the way Scrum works this problem is noticed as the sprint ends which is usually well before the project is to be delivered. This is the good news.

The bad news is that, in my case, I have around 40 hours of work left to accomplish in one week. We're expected to put in about 12 hours a week individually. As I hinted before, that's a problem. At this point in the project I can defer some of the work to later sprints if need be. But first, prioritization.

The critical items (not started):

• X-Box 360 support
• Beam weapon rendering
• Beam weapon test
• Capital ship gun turrets (guns which can independently shoot targets)
• Targeting cursor/crosshairs

The incomplete items:

• The targeting computer
• Weapon status display is working but ugly
• Smoke/flames/tracers (barely started)
• Sorting/grouping of graphics by how they're to be drawn
• The network code (still untested)

So now that I have what I want to do I need to decide what I need to do. My primary goal for this phase is to get the fundamentals of multiplayer working and to get the game on the X-Box. I also want there to be enough supporting code done that I can get shooting and killing other players working in the next sprint.

This leaves:

• The network code
• X-Box 360 support

This cuts the amount of work left from ~40 hours to 10.5 hours or so. Much better.