What is Kanban?
At the highest level, Kanban is a methodology by which to organise and develop projects, but before I go into too much detail on the subject, I just want to say that I am very new to kanban as a concept. As such, I am going to be writing about why we have just adopted it and what it means to us as a team. As we are still learning ourselves, I just want to make clear that I am not trying to completely define Kaban, but simply providing a quick overview to provide context.
Kaban is a method by which we can view and track our development pipeline from start to finish. At its core, the methodology is designed to break a project up into stages of completion, with each component of the product being broken up into tasks. Over time the goal is to move each task from your initial phase to a release state incrementally, passing through each part of the development pipeline along the way.
"Capping" in Kaban means to limit the number of tasks that can be placed into certain stages at any given time. This keeps you focused on delivering individual elements of your project, and for us means we don't suffer from overwhelm. Especially useful with small team sizes such as ours.
By its nature, it is a very visual process, with the concept originating from the use of physical cards and traditional task/whiteboards in the car manufacturing industry. We use the visual elements to identify tasks, bottlenecks and time estimates at a glance. All of which are extremely useful to be able to do when working on a rapidly developed project such as ours.
An overview of IsoEngine.
So the project we are working on runs under two codenames. The first is the "IsoEngine", and the second is "Reign of Rains". IsoEngine is the actual game-engine component that we are developing, which serves as a complex level editor that will eventually be used internally as well as be shipped to consumers. Reign of Rains is the name we are giving to the small player experiences that we will release alongside the editor at launch, which is designed to demonstrate the capabilities of the IsoEngine.
We currently don't have a fixed specification for either of these, as we like to remain flexible in what we deem sensible for the direction that we're taking the toolset. As such Kaban allows us not to heavily invest in large design decisions early on, allowing us to rapidly and cheaply pivot based on feedback at any moment.
Our community focus.
One aspect of our company that is massively important to us is maintaining a focus on openness and transparency, in such a way that is almost extreme by game developer standards. One effort that we are really pushing towards being able to implement is a system by which the community can rapidly suggest features for us to implement alongside our core systems. This could be a request in the form of content or something like editor functionality.
This is where Kaban is most important for us, as it allows us to update and add features to our roadmap in real-time, work on them rapidly and then ship in the form of a small incremental update. Without this flexibility, our vision for the company falls apart, and we essentially toss a whole year worth of work.
Chosen toolset.
To actually implement this workflow we are moving our tasks into Jira, which so far looks great for our purposes. It has clearly laid out stages, easy to edit tasks, and even has a roadmap feature. For us, a roadmap was something that really sold me on the package, as we have been building up to needing them for our Kickstarter campaign anyway. This is just a convenient all in one system, which can tie everything together and remove maintenance overhead that we would otherwise have to account for.
So that was just a quick overview of our change over to a project management based development style. Something we desperately need as the project gets more complex. I believe that this more formal switch helps us grow rapidly now we are picking up steam, and I'm extremely optimistic about the future of our project. Thanks for joining us on this journey, and be sure to check future posts for updates on how this changeover goes. Have a great week everyone!