Okay, I'll try a more serious question. I'm a programmer that works on bespoke business apps and I use Jira at work. How do you guys use Jira? Is it the "source of truth" for tracking what people are working on and how completely they feel it is, what's assigned to them but unstarted, etc. Have you modified the workflow and statuses to better represent the ship pipeline, for example? Or is it all spreadsheets? :)While I'd love to hear about this, I can see where showing screenshots like cardwalls would be great in help explaining but perhaps more info than we can handle.asked by TGWS/Bennu

You already said it, if it's not in Jira it doesn't exist, that is definitely a methodology that we're not only adopting but utilizing more and more everyday. Jira definitely is becoming more of our production tools and were trying to encourage people to keep the statuses up to date because it does help communicate accross studio about the status, when things are being delivered and how much work is left.If you've ever done any project management you know if you can build a backlog as realistic and thorough and good bids, the better because you can now go okay it will take me an hour to sit down and tell you exactly how thing this is going to take to get done. Now that's usually is at like darian said at the beginning, when you start off with that it's usually when you got into battle the moment you start the project, it all changes and you got to keep it up to date, but at least you start with it and you can start getting estimates, you can see how long things are going to take, you can see the resources you need.We are at the start of that with our leads. Our leads go, we get our vision, the leads break it down, the producers put that all together. We look at what that means for us and we get the realities together and I think Jira, the point of Jira is to collect all that information as much as you can so when you look at something like 1.3.0, when we want to deliver it. We constantly look at what's left, what's the big blockers, what's trivial, what really won't break anything, what will keep things moving and we can make quick decisions faster.

So we can bump it to the next version.

So on and so forth, So if it's not in Jira it doesn't exist that's kind of because our Mantra, and we're doing our best to maintain that as our database.

It also helps with accountability. So for example if someone starts working on a task that's not in Jira, how do we account for how much time was spent on it, is it a feature we actually needed in the first place, so by having everyone working through Jira on specific tasks,we create a paper trail on what's been worked on, how long people have spent on it, how long it's taken, how much time is left to complete it. It gives the production team the roadmap that we can provide that information whether it's to you guys on how soon we are presenting something, it lets us tell the other team here where we're at where are you guys, okay cool let's work together on this and let's see what we can come up with.

Absolutely and any sort of tracking tools. it's only as good as the people that use it, and it's only as good as the people that keep it up to date. If the goal for someone is to say, hey what is calix working on, What does it say in Jira, in search oh he's working on this, it says in progress is that right? Yup, Great! Not only have you sped up communication, you've made it efficient for someone to go oh Calix can't work on that because he has this this and this or we can say that's not the priority anymore, we're shifting to this because of a certain release. It makes us, makes decisions quicker.

Or you know Zane suddenly decided one day, "I'm gonna make a 3D environment for the capital class ship HUD system" and that's not on his task list and we see him working on that we're like zane, were getting close a deadline here, that's really awesome but let's get that into the schedule but right now our crunch time because we have this this and this, this is what the needs of the product are right now. Now as far what workflows, we've modified and it's all spreadsheets. I spent a lot of time in Excel, I'm an Excel guy, I love using Excel.

And I don't think you'll ever get out of Excel. Excel is a great tool for scenario building and planning and you can move things around quicker until you have all the data, you can make more assumptions with Excel than you can with Jira: Jira needs actual data.

And we've been playing around with Microsoft Project.

Yup!

Shotgun!

Yup, a lot of good production tools that are all kind of working together.