How is your team/studio organized?

lefix

I am curious what tools/methods people are using to organize and manage their tasks in development. What tools is your team using to organize features, break down tasks and assign them to the team members? How do you interact between departments?

I am currently working in a small startup where we originally set up a trello board for the project, created one or multiple cards for each feature, used the labels to flag departments involved (i.e. Art, Front-End, Game Design).
I loved the simplicity of it at first, but now as the team and the project has been growing, the board is starting to get a little cluttered. So maybe it is time for us to switch to a new solution. As I never had the experience of working in a larger, established studio, I have no grasp of how they structure their production. This is why I am hear some stories from everyone here who has been part of a team before, share their experience and maybe give feedback on what worked well for them, and what didn't. Thanks!

To share a bit more information about our process:
On a larger scale, we have a trello board for planning (where we had a collumn for each milestone, and later on a collumn for each new update) where we prioritize and move features back and forth.

Then we also have a Trello board for weekly sprints (doing very light scrum), a planning meeting every monday morning where we commit to user stories (broken down fragments of features we are working on), estimate complexity and label them with whatever departments are involved. And a review meeting on friday afternoons.

We moved QA out of sprint board, as it turned out that users stories tend to never really get done because bugs always come and go. Since we were already using mantis for bugtracking, that kind of made sense.

Marketing also had their own board, as we wanted to keep the weekly sprint board related to the product, and they tend to work with alot of third parties.

low odor

That sounds pretty  typical.

The Team I am  working on at the moment is doing rapid prototyping...with the occasional production work depending on a few things. We're small enough that we have our leads  handle all the planning (through Jira) and it is mostly hands off for the team. The most this  really amounts to  on my  end is  answering: How long do you think this will take? Where are we with this? We do  2 week sprints. I love it because I don't have to mess with planning  software  or sit in meetings. 

RyanB

lefix said:

I am curious what tools/methods people are using to organize and manage their tasks in development. What tools is your team using to organize features, break down tasks and assign them to the team members? How do you interact between departments?

We're currently using Pivotal Tracker.  No complaints from team.

Tasks are prioritized by a feature's importance (determined by people managing the project) and our time estimates to finish a task. 

We also use Slack but it's not really useful since we are all within 30 feet of each other.  Slack is useful if you have people working outside your office.  I physically get up and talk to people and write down notes.

Most of us have 16+ years of experience and we're a small team.  Very, very positive response from all who have seen our game (senior people at various major publishers) and we're going into closed beta on the 5th.  Easily the best team and development process I've worked with in my career.

Kwramm

The company as a whole uses Hansoft. For the big picture I keep a GANTT. It's not that we're doing waterfall, but I like the visibility it gives, and it's something most people can easily relate to visually. It shows everyone what we plan to work on when and where we are now. It also helps with the Scrum we're doing. We can't polish forever, because we're not directly working for a client but a bigger organization with their own internal deadlines. So the GANTT adds a bit of urgency and reminds us to focus when picking for the backlogs. It's also a nice tool for blocking out work and planning potential developer assignments and bookings.
Each bigger work item is then done in a Scrum like process - depending on user involvement and time-frame we have sprints, POs, etc. But every project has a backlog and a sprint backlog. We manage this with Trello. The downside with Trello is that it isn't a good tool to manage time. The problem is not so much that I want to be a penny-pincher about work hours, but that I want to track down inefficiencies and waste in our process that could be optimized or automated. For some jobs we fall back to waterfall - usually those jobs where there is little uncertainty and which we have lots of experience on and where customer input is minimal.
What's important for us is communication. Different teams in the company work with different planning methods. But they all share Hansoft. The coders do Scrum + Project Manager (i.e. pseudo Scrum as usual in game dev), the artists mostly work iterative and incremental guided by a producer (i.e. no Scrum). I don't see a benefit in putting a "one solution for everyone" over an entire studio.

Imho it works best to let every department pick their weapon of choice. You want the same process within a department so teams can learn from each other. But you also want a process that suits the department's type of work and organization. Then all you have to care about are the interfaces between the departments and team and how communication flows, so that there are no surprises.

Eric Chadwick

We have a team of about 20 people, spread across the US and also in China.

Lately we've been using Sifter to organize tasks vs. bugs. We've also been using Jell for daily status updates, that's worked pretty well. We're using Slack for text chat, and Skype for a weekly all-hands voice update meeting. SVN for source control, with a separate repository for all the art source files since they tend to be large binary files.

One hurdle for us has been finding tools that are accessible both in China and the US. 

We used to use QQ, a Chinese chat client with some great features, but some people had trouble installing it. We also used to use Asana for task tracking, but that was a bit too unwieldy. We used to use SharePoint for file transfers, but Microsoft's backend has been a bit flaky. Currently we use Dropbox for sharing larger files. We've used quite a few other tools too, which I'm not remembering very well at the moment.