Starting up the project

– Posted on January 17, 2011Posted in: General

I feel so energized.

We started up this year with getting right to business and I presented the new intro/newbie design for the dev team this Tuesday. I have to say I was very excited and curious about what they would think about it, especially as some of them just have started up their Hattrick career or at least have it in fresh mind. So I was very relieved – and glad – when Michael shouted out loud that he wanted to start all over again: “I want to get this start instead”. And the rest agreed with him.

Me and Chris then finished the day off with discussing how the project could be divided into smaller parts. Then I went to my hotel to write an upcoming editorial about the “new” HT team. When I came to the office the next day (just after nine, for the record) the devs had already starting to plan the project more in detail, as if they couldn’t wait any longer or as if there was no tomorrow. Needless to say it felt just great to start the day like that – enthusiasm and motivation are very contageous.

Anyway, I joined in and what we did was dividing each step into smaller pieces and from there find out exactly what’s required to get them done, and then putting each piece up on the planning board. And when I left the board looked like this:

How a Hattrick project looks on the planning board. Green notes are “bigger parts” of the projects, and the yellow notes are pieces of each part. The magnets (with our avatars) illustrates who’s currently working on what (some new devs still lack a magnet of their own).

Foppe-

Posted January 17, 2011 at 2:12 PM

Sounds awesome 🙂

Richard

Posted January 20, 2011 at 1:08 PM

Tip: Try Jira with Greenhopper plugin. Way better then a board with stickies.

Oscar

Posted January 23, 2011 at 12:37 PM

Neat! Old school scrum. How about switching to e.g. Pivotaltracker (https://www.pivotaltracker.com) internally and then integrate/roll-out (some things) to the users on the site? Would be neat if we could see some more details on changes, even though it’s understandable that some things are kept secret. Transparency has changed a lot over the past few years, but it could be even better – and as conversations/crowd-sourcing could be used, it’ll make it easier for you guys with limited resources!

HT-Johan

Posted January 25, 2011 at 12:11 PM

I’m using Pivotal to track ideas and to plan future projects, but for the actual sprints everyone are quite happy with the board. I too see potential in linking our tools to some kind of public view, let’s see if we find the right method for that.