Take a look at this —–>

Doesn’t it look awesome? A bun, cut into two, with a hole digged into it where there’s “almond icing” (is that even a word in English?) And then whipped cream and a lid with some icing sugar dusted on top. Semla. There are five of them with my name on, in the PC office fridge. My kids will love me today. Who said you can’t buy love? Wrong!

And as usual this has little or nothing to do with game development. I actually started writing a post yesterday that had more to do with that, but then I got busy doing other stuff and now…well, it feels a bit outdated. So instead of a Monday-post I had to write a Tuesday-post and as it’s Fat Tuesday in Sweden I felt the need to say something about semlor (semla in plural).

Moving on. I found another thread in the PS forum on the upcoming release of Power Racing, and the teaser film I was talking about the other day. Someone apparently interpreted my post as if the game itself was ready for release this week. And of course it isn’t. So, I’m sorry if some of you were disappointed when realising I was talking about the film, not the game. Tomas U is working on the film even as we speak, while working on some mockups and the HUD… And they say men can’t do more than one thing at the same time!? I say beluga!

Other things going in here at the moment… We have a master thesis/project student with us - Christian. He started his 15 week Power Challenge project period yesterday and he seems to fit in just nicely. His main focus will be the PR tracks, probably with some special attention to object placement and how to improve that process. He’s more than welcome to the team.

On the scrum boards this week we find stories like “single player: speed race”, “edit badge”, “font for power racing web”, “graphics: race flow”, “default badge”, “be able to save replay data”, “create legend”, “Nice: create curbs” - just to mention a few. The stories are not always split up with a complete sense of logic. For instance, sometimes we lift out the graphical components, making that a story on it’s own. Sometimes that is included in a larger, more all inclusive kind of story. Like “single player: speed race”. That includes everything from data base structure, saving the data, launching the client, starting the race, the HUD etc etc. It varies.

Well, maybe I should go and try to fetch some coffee or stare at an excel file or…something. Or do some laps on Drahmeldorf..?

See you soon. Maybe with some sneak peaks of our super fun game (it all depends on how Tomas’ multi tasking skills are doing)

/ L

After the move-around-the-desks project last week I now have a better view of everyone in the racing team. In a good way. And I’ve got more space now so I can spread my things (gloves, bags, moisturising hand cream, scarves, shoes, post it notes, framed photos of the kids, books, drawings etc) more. And still have enough rooom for people dropping by, having a chat, asking about the backlog, discuss story points or beg me to stop adding weird songs on our mutual Spotify playlists. (I’m actually considering placing a couple of visitors chairs in front of my desk to really achieve that teacher/headmaster vs. “ill behaving kid in school” feeling)

So, the office is in order, everyone’s got their desk where its’ supposed to be. The Scrummasters have been appointed, the whiteboards wiped and re-filled…and - we have new teams!

We’re doing some serious scrum experimenting at the moment, going against the very heart and soul of scrum. We’re actually abandoning the idea of cross functional teams. We’re doing it the opposite way, putting people into either the “client/c++team” or the “webteam” depending on their preferences and skills.

Complete anarchy and major heavy stuff, I know. But we want to give it a try and see how it goes. There will of course have to be plenty of communication between the two teams (who are both part of the racing team) to avoid unnecessary dependencies etc. No doubt, there will be some close encounters and tricky situation but we believe the pros outnumber the cons.

I sense a new era is dawning. One with functional teams, dedicated Scrum Masters (or Master Of Universe as they like to be referred to…), sensibel backlogs and a whole new (gu)es(s)timation process.

The week is rapidly coming to an end, there’s a soccer demo in a few minutes and after that Fredagsfika…

Everyone - have a brilliant weekend and I’ll see you on Monday. (I’ve prepared for my chill out Friday with chips and dip and popcorn and there will be a fire burning in the fireplace and I’m gonna watch Resident Evil.

Milla is my kind of hero)

// L

When you look out through my window, by my desk, this is what you see

(no photoshopping done here, I swear, this is as damp grey dystopian sad it really looks!)

What can I say? Look up “dull” in the dictionary and there you have it! The back of our office building in early December.

But inside the office things are really cooking. Oh yeah. Per is being his usual creative self and suddenly I’m not the only one doing manual work, using scissors and scotch tape! Excellent! But what is he doing?

Any takers? Oh come on, just one guess? No? He’s rearranging the backlog of course! Like hello!? Just gotta love that out-of-the-computer-thinking. Why keep it in Excel if it doesn’t feel right for you? Free your backlog! Let’s do it old school.

And on my way back from the kitchen (with like the 8th cup of tea today, spiked with honey) I found Pow who’s wearing green today! That just had to be documented. Green is such a perky color.

And to the left of Pow, there are some clever people trying to get some work done (he just bugs them):

Stroll on, move on, keep going. Behind that 90’s shade of blue wall you find Per, now busy with more manual work. Very refreshing! But there’s a terrible story behind this picture. You wanna hear it? Well, Tomas U, the man ripping out the sensitive parts of Per’s computer, is up to his neck in some Very Important Stuff, like making inspirational material for Power Racing. The problem is, he needed more memory. Well, not him, his computer. So he simply hijacked Per’s. “The RAM or your Jolt” he said. Of course Per let him take the memory.

So there you have it, even the nice ones go a bit crazy when the computer runs slow.

Our very great executive producer and Scrum Officer, Richard, is holding 3 times 2 hour scrum sessions with everyone. Very good initiative! We all need to be on the same level with things, especially something as fundamental as our production/development method. Thank you Richard! (and look, aren’t the racing team just the cutest?)

// office blogger No 1

I’m the earliest bird here at the office. Most days Sebastian is here before me, sometimes Simon as well. Then it’s me, then Magnus or Per, then Mikko and Jukka, Erik (most of my precious team) and then, somtime between 8.30 and 9 the rest just sort of keep rolling in… Daily scrums are holy, same time, same place, same people every day. You need one hell of an excuse not to be there. Like “the crocodile ate my bike” or “my grandmother’s Alsatian walked me in the wrong direction” or “Tomas A kept calling me all night saying funny things so I just couldn’t sleep and then didn’t hear my alarm in the morning”. Stuff like that we simply have to forgive.

Anyhow. It’s nice here at this time of the day. Completely quiet, rather dark (except for the cosy Duderö light, from IKEA, obviously - we are Swedes after all!)

That’s not a picture from our office, but it’s the same kind of lamp.

And soon it’s time to put up the electric advent candlesticks. Have no clue if that’s a world wide phenomenon, but in Sweden it’s a major happening. Come December 1st and there  are lights in every window. Stars, candlesticks, angels, reindeers… anything that looks good with a light bulb. Or seven.

This is what the Power Challenge elctric advent celebration looks like:

We got six of them, maybe that’s not enough? Maybe we need some illuminous reindeers or something… have to give it some serious consideration.

Now it’s time for me to walk out of the office, cross the street, enter Hemköp (Swedish grocery store) and buy some buns/glögg/cake/candy. It’s sprint planning day today, and retrospection, and God (Sipwell) knows we need the sugar rush.

Plus, it’s absolutely freezing in Linköping today, so we all need some warm glögg to keep us from turning into ice cones.

I’m outie. Stuff to buy, sprints to plan.

/ L

Our eminent Executive Producer Richard held a two hour “getting to know scrum”-session with the racing team today. It was partially based on some equally eminent slides by Henrik Kniberg, the number one God in the house of Scrum according to Richard

And I agree. Those two days of Scrum Mastering he took us through were filled with realistic, eye opening observations and examples from real life, all delivered with a great sense of humour and self-perception. Entertaining and educational.

So, we agree that Henrik is on the same level as Jesus. Minimum. Maybe he’s Jesus’ older brother. Anyway, what was interesting to see today, was that the developers themselves didn’t have a hard time getting the core values or principles of Scrum and Agile. They could relate. They nodded and smiled and remembered projects they’d been part of that were very similar to those presented on the slides.

And that’s the beauty of Scrum. It’s all about common sense. It’s not the magic bullet. It’s not (despite what I said about Henrik) a divine solution of all evil in the world. It’s just a matter of facing reality, accepting facts and STOP LYING!

A stakeholder (investor/publisher) want something. They ask someone (CEO/Project Manager/Sales Director) how long it will take to build and how much money it’s gonna cost. That someone wants to get the contract. In order to get it, they lie. Yes. They know they can’t make any promises, they know everything changes during the production cycle, they know software development isn’t predictable… still they make promises.

The traditional waterfall method isn’t based on mutual trust or the acceptance of change as a given factor. And that’s why most projects of that kind are destined to fail. (I know there are endless ways to define “fail” or “success”, but still…) Things change. People reconsider. Stuff happens. Nothing, ever, follows the plan.

And that whole trust/lie-issue is covered in this excellent presentation by Henrik (it’s in Swedish, sorry all you foreign people dying to know more about why scrummers don’t lie)

…and that’s where my focus just drops. Need coffe or water or something. I think it’s time to wrap this up and sign out. And also, it’s demo time in a few minutes. This sprint is over and we show the rest of the office, potential stakeholders etc what’s been done since last week.

I think the retrospective is gonna have to wait until tomorrow. My brain is really of no use to anyone right now. Excellent time to go through the product backlog.

See you later.

// Linda

I’m a certified master of scrum. It doesn’t really mean anything else than “I participated in a Certified Scrum Master Course” - but still. It sounds kind of cool.

So, this event took place in Stockholm last week and there were four of us Power Challengians attending; me, Richard, Hannes and Tobias.

(If you haven’t got any idea whatsoever what scrum and agile is all about - take a look here:

http://agilemanifesto.org/

http://www.scrumalliance.org/

That should get you started. Just google away, there are plenty of interesting blogs and websites on agile development, scrum, xp… Have a look, it’s actually really interesting even if you’re not a programmer yourself. It’s more of a state of mind, an attitude).

Anyways, scrum is one of several agile methods and we’ve been working towards a greater scrumness at Power Challenge for the last six months or so. There are many reasons to love scrum, one is that it’s all about common sense. Another that it requires a minimum of administration - it’s very intuitive. A third - you get to use post-it notes and draw on whiteboards. A fourth, people get more involved in (and have more power over) their work. Etc. etc. etc.

This scrum course was held by Henrik Kniberg from Crisp, consultants who are experts on agile software development. It was great. Even better than great! Common sense, everyday life examples, simple methods, self managing teams… we already knew this but the genious of the whole way of thinking is still striking.

Afterwards, when talking about what we had learned, there was a certain religiousness in the air…  Don’t get me wrong, there wasn’t any speaking in tounges or brainwashing taking place. On the contrary, like I said before, scrum is all about common sense and back to basics.

So, if you are at all interested in project management or software development I can really recommend some reading on the subject. Henrik’s book is a great way to start, you find it here http://www.infoq.com/minibooks/scrum-xp-from-the-trenches

Don’t worry if the terminology complicates things, we’re all beginners in the beginning, right? The very foundation of scrum is to keep things simple and remove everything that gets in the way of that, but it might take a while before the project- and code talk makes sense (it did for me!)

Give it a shot and see the world in a different light

// Linda, Master Of Most Things

Being in the middle of something sort of takes that healthy distantness (yes it’s a real word! I looked it up…) away from you. No macro perspective in sight, just dwelling on the details blowing everything out of proportion. And sometimes it’s a good thing. It drives you forward. It keeps you on edge, on your toes, focused. But then something REALLY important happens. A bus crashes in to a car, the cat needs surgery or there was another tsunami… and then you just don’t worry too much about those shoes that doesn’t fit, or that level you never finished - or that task someone didn’t work on. It gives you perspective.

This happens both at home and at work. You get caught up in what you do and sometimes it’s hard to raise one’s head and look beyond.

It’s just that sometimes the line you walk is really really thin, between being a control freak and being negligent.

See what I mean?

(more scrum cartoons at http://www.implementingscrum.com/cartoons/)

My last post (hopefully) explained a bit about where our ideas come from. It’s not just the people who have “gamedesign” on their card that come up with suggestions for how the game should move forward. A lot of times the inspiration and new thoughts come from the community, from the developers themselves or the Product Owner (= in our case a really cool guy named Eric).

The Product Owner is the product’s (Power Soccer) very protective guardian who makes sure the game has everything it needs and grows the way it’s supposed to. He looks after the game in every possible way. If someone or something stands in the way of the game - the P.O. makes sure someone moves that obsticle aside, always focusing on the games best interest.

Get the picture?

Ok, so let’s say that Eric The Product Owner decides that the grass needs to be greener. It’s just not colourful enough on the field. He runs this idea by the people who should be involved in the actual development of this feature. The P.O. knows what the game needs from a gamer/marketing pers´pective but at this point doesn’t know anything about the technical process to get there. After speaking to the people involved (a graphical artist, the producer, a developer or two) this feature/task is put in the “backlog” (usually the P.O. himself manages the backlog, in our case it’s the producer).

The backlog (a worksheet with magical macros) is where everything that’s going to be developed, every smallest change, tweak, graphical element is listed. It’s the administrative backbone of the game. It’s the heart and soul of Power Soccer - in writing.

So, Mr Eric Product Owner’s idea of making the field more colourful could end up in a worksheet looking like this:

[Feature group] 3D Game [Title] Fix grass on field [Story] Make the grass greener. Includes new texture and shading.

(That’s probably not how one of the graphical artists would have put it, but never mind. It’s just to give you a picture of how we do stuff.)

We also include some information on status, how the feature will be demonstrated after finished and more. And now the feature is added to the backlog, it has an “importance” value and it’s waiting to be developed.

We want happier users so we make the stadiums prettier. To get the stadiums prettier we need the graphical artists and c++ programmers to create new objects and modify the code accordingly, and the web/interface designers to keep it all together on the surface. The new objects and code have to work together with all the rest, not causing any conflicts and not add too much to the size of the game - we have to keep it small.

So what or who decides WHEN it’s time to start with a new feature? Again, it’s a lot to do with the Product Owner - with some cooperation/negotiation with the producer, who in his/her turn hands the feature over to the team do decide HOW. What do we want to achieve? What do we need to get there? How long will it take? Questions that bring us features that bring us pretty slices on the scrumboard. (pardon my project manager language) Ideas - suggestions - features - slices. Dreams - reality.

That was one example. There are literally hundreds of features, broken down in to bite sized backlog items just waiting to be built. And it’s all a juggling act, deciding what the next step should be, showing investors good results, making games we’re proud of, being the best employers in the world… Keeping everybody happy.

Is that really what good games are all about? Happiness in less than 10 MB?

Time to stop writing for today. Sorry if the fast lesson in scrum and our way of work was too long, yet too shallow. Tell me what I missed and I’ll fill in the gaps.

// Linda

This weekend (as you can also read in Richards post) there was an intense event at Barkaby Airfield - a couple of the guys from the office and Max from Pole Position teamed up with some total racing maniacs for an entire day filled with fun and games = wicked Japanese cars, skid marks, smoking tires and what have you… I’ve seen the pictures and it looks awesome. Max and the rest of the guys were more than happy with the recordings (and the driving).

Don’t you just want their job?

So, what else is new? Well, this week we’ve had a really interesting and impressive meeting with some guys from Donya that create polygon reduction and optimization miracles. Of course, highly relevant to an online gaming company that certainly think that size matters! And people, let’s face it. Less is as a matter of fact less, not more, no matter what someone might try to tell you. It’s less. Littler. Not so much.

On the scrum side of things I can tell you that the burndown chart is looking great for the racing team this sprint! (and for those of you that aren’t familiar with the terminology - just follow the links to the Scrum Alliance’s glossary) My boys have worked really focused and estimated their slices well so the burndown looks splendid! I told them to take an hour off Friday afternoon but as usual they didn’t pay any attention to me.

Everybody seem to really enjoy working in a scrum environment. More power to the people that actually build the stuff, less talk about things that aren’t gonna happen anyway and more insight in what everbody is actually working on.

If you’ve ever thought of trying out agile development, read “Scrum and XP from the trenches” by Henrik Kniberg (or some other book on the subject - but Henriks book is very to the point without being to “heavy” for a beginner) After that - give it a try. Just do it, like som famous sports company usually says.

Have a great midsummer everyone!