Eternally idealistic

Filed under Design Diary on March 26, 2008
Keywords: agile development, Eternal Warlords, ideal days, SmartFoxServer

I’ve been asked about an update on the development of Eternal Warlords: Arena. I posted a little over 2 months ago that we had about 3 weeks of development work left before we had a fully functional alpha version.

What I have failed to account for, time and again, is that these time estimates are based on ideal days. Ideal days are a component of agile software development methodologies. An ideal day is one where a developer could code for eight hours without interruption.

There is no such thing as an Ideal Day.

Figbox is a bunch of students. They have classes to take and projects they have to complete to graduate. I, Chris, and Aaron all have full-time jobs and families that take precedent over our responsibilities for Goldbox. When issues arise, we have to coordinate calendars to meet, troubleshoot, resolve and communicate the solution to those involved.

Last Friday, Chris and I spent a couple hours troubleshooting a connection issue with the SmartFoxServer software that Figbox had reported two weeks prior. It appears a simple restart of the SmartFoxServer fixed things, but Figbox didn’t have the permissions to do so, and Chris and I didn’t have the opportunity to get together to pool resources any sooner.

I got an email yesterday from Figbox reporting that they have been able to connect to SmartFoxServer and are back on track. They estimate another two weeks to finish an alpha version for testing.

I’m counting that in Ideal Days.

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