Communication is Key

With the addition of our new project manager, we've adopted a few new practices that have enabled us to start to develop again, primarily among them the Sprint methodology.

Every Monday we (digitally) sit down and have a meeting discussing the sprint; a small slice of the large pie to focus on for the week such as designing and implementing a new font, team-coloring all the GUI assets, or setting up an asset sharing platform for all the team members. 

Once we iron out the week's goals each morning we perform a stand-up meeting focusing on the big three questions:

1. What did I accomplish yesterday?
2. What will I do today?
3. What obstacles are impeding my progress?

This has proved invaluable to our productivity. It's almost become an in-joke to shout "My status is blocked!" Knowing what you've done, what you are going to do, and letting the team know if there is something you need them to do to progress something you are working on has greased the development wheels immensely.

Communication is key though; proper communication. Posting bug reports or screenshots to Skype logs is fast and easy in the moment but ends up lost in minutes as soon as something else is said. Trello is our acting bug tracker, backlog, and sprint manager, as you've seen posted before. It's very useful for sorting and tagging members to specific cards. We use labels for User Stories, Programming cards, Bugs, Graphics work, and general Tasks, all of which can be filtered by.

So what is in store for our next sprint? You'll have to check back to see the minutes Monday.