What's happening in here?

[DossarLX ODI]

I can't speak on behalf of the dev team but I can provide insight to restructuring that's taking place with how the batch is being handled. Recently some of you may have seen the post about adopting a Sprint-Style structure similar to what would be used on JIRA, and I'll explain how that fits in to the judging process after listing out the many inefficiencies of the traditional approach to the batch system. This post is informational and presents the situation the way it is, no sugar-coating or sensationalism -- the community should have a fair treatment to understand what's going on.

Traditional approach: Judges didn't get assigned tasks. They voluntarily said they would judge a set, but too often what happens is that weeks after stating this they don't give a response and then the original deadline would come up.

Better approach: To analyze the current practical judge team, find the most active judges and ask them for their availability. Assign tasks to the Judge Team. Organize what's in To Do, In Progress, and Done. Judges also need to log their hours worked on their set. This way the Judgment Team can see if the Judge is taking longer than expected on a set, that judge can do 50% and another judge can do 50% to split up the work of the task accordingly instead of having the task hang for a long time with no communication.

Essentially I can make a similar connection to the dev team. From what I've seen, they have no progress monitoring process and don't assign tasks clearly. With this new idea of 2-week sprints with a spreadsheet showing what's To Do, In Progress, and Done, the dev team can see who was assigned a certain development task, how long the person has spent on it and if that person needs help, and redefine tasks if a situation changes.

Silvuh has done a great job keeping track of which files have been submitted to which batch. However, right now there is a huge backlog that's just sitting in the batch email and to make OWA's idea come into life would be unrealistic. Right now I'm working on finding potential hard files to be in a special batch that should be open in the next week to contribute to this mentality shift of harder files and a bigger difficulty spectrum.

Here's currently what is on To Do, In Progress, and Done in the spoiler.

To Do

Sets
Set 2 Full Notes (1st notes) - Unassigned
Set 3 Full Notes (2nd notes) - Unassigned
Judge Passed Files - Unassigned

8/25/15 Song Release
Determine difficulties for the release - OWA
Convert and sync files - Dossar
Upload song levels and info - Dossar
Write thread and front page post - Dossar


In Progress

Sets
Set 1 Full Notes (3rd notes) - Razor
Set 3 Full Notes (1st notes) - lurker

8/25/15 Song Release
Determine two songs to be released - Dossar

Put together hard song batch
Discuss difficulty spectrum increase idea - Dossar
Determine current batch files for hard batch - Dossar


Done

Sets
Set 1 Full Notes (1st notes) - ilikexd
Set 1 Full Notes (2nd Notes) - Silvuh
Set 2 Full Notes (2nd notes) - DarkZtar
Set 2 Full Notes (3rd notes) - gameboy42690
Set 3 Full Notes (3rd notes) - gameboy42690

Put together hard song batch
Download and organize the batches - Silvuh
Run NPS generator through the batches - Silvuh

Take a minute to think about the above tasks. It's clear who is assigned what (and which tasks are unassigned). If dev also took this approach, similar to JIRA, they would know how much time has been spent on a certain task (I didn't include that here but the spreadsheet does list logged time) and be able to monitor progress appropriately.