Scaling TripleA - Getting More Done

LaFayette

We want TripleA to grow, to gain new features, game-play be easier, faster, maps more interesting and everything prettier.

So, how can you help?

create bug requests directly into the bug tracker after a problem has been identified in any forum thread
avoid having a dev do anything you can do yourself
do not PM dev's asking for something to be done, instead create a bug tracker item

Background:

I would like to address and point out the scaling problem TripleA has. As TripleA has grown from a small project, where one person could handle the code, another could handle communication and submitting bug reports, as the volume of people and traffic has grown, this no longer works

Development is one of the slowest things to happen for TripleA. Most interesting features take perhaps anywhere from 10 - 50 hours of work. The way I see it, those that can code, we want them to spend time coding, not doing general communication on forums, not finding bug reports on forums and transferring them to bug tracking, not managing maps, and generally not doing anything that could not be done otherwise by the community.

The trick I think for scaling is we need to be sure that we update any process so that a team of people can handle the item rather than just an individual. If for example "Joe" handles all maps, then when the amount of map stuff is too much for "Joe", we'll see a backlog. If "Joe" goes on vacation, everything stops, and if Joe gets tired of spending 20 hours a week on maps and backs away, then everything grinds to a halt. Worse yet, if Joe leaves, all the know-how Joe had in his head leaves too, and suddenly not only is there nobody to manage maps, but nobody even knows how to manage maps.

Teams solve this, if all map items go to a queue, and a team works on the queue, people can take vacations, people can rotate in and out. The team has incentive to document how the team operates so that new team members can join and become effective and everything doesn't stop when one person leaves.

Without a team handling items, when it is individuals, we do not scale.

We see this problem mostly in bug reports and change requests in forums. If we rely on individual developers to read, distill and create bug reports, then we have a bottleneck and an individual responsible for a process. If that individual stops creating bug reports from problems reported in forums, then we won't get any new items in the bug queue. Notice, the bug queue is a process that goes to a team, all developers work on it. We could easily have the one developer not create a bug report and fix the problem, but then we are into the "silo" problem to an extreme.

Hepps

@LaFayette I can't speak to a lot of what you are proposing as I am a Luddist by nature and ignorance... my contributions or scope of contributions is limited to my even more limited skill-set.

But I am eager to help where the axes of time and skill intersect.