[2018] Jagex, why is your feedback loop very Waterfall when you're trying to be Agile?

Originally posted by ExtremeHunt

Jagex always say they are reading our feedback, whenever this is on Reddit, the forums blah, blah, blah. But even then I have a strange feeling Jagex staff has always a favorite place they most of the time will check upon and read. So letting one or another place to leave feedback to be less likely to be read. Though feedback/suggestions on Reddit almost have to get to the front page, else it also seems Jagex will give it an awful low priority.

You're trying to show that you're agile moving to a weekly release process but the true power of agile development is quickly receiving feedback from the last week of changes and being able to incorporate that into your currently prioritized backlog of work.

Problem with this is that Jagex has thier own scripting language, RuneScript, that doesn't/barely support any kind of testing tooling, such as Unit Tests. Instead they have a QA team that test it manually (so an internally dedicated beta test team.) Besides this point, Jagex also has 2 clients to maintain the content would work on. So they need to test it on 2 client manually, which requires an awful a lot of time (yay Monday bugs). This is also why Jagex wants to get rid of the Java client as Jagex themselves had stated they really want to do this, but the amount of players that are on Java is simply holding them back.

The point of agile development is to be flexible, being able to release stuff quickly due to small development cycles. Also you must be able to test your system super efficiently as how agile development stands the work you deliver must meet certain criteria. So those would be a couple requirements as well testing. This is called a Definition of Done Examples:

1.Definition of Done checklist for User Story

• Produced code for presumed functionalities

• Assumptions of User Story met

• Project builds without errors

• Unit tests written and passing

• Project deployed on the test environment identical to production platform

• Tests on devices/browsers listed in the project assumptions passed

• Feature ok-ed by UX designer

• QA performed & issues resolved

• Feature is tested against acceptance criteria

• Feature ok-ed by Product Owner

• Refactoring completed

• Any configuration or build changes documented

• Documentation updated

• Peer Code Review performed

2.Definition of Done checklist for Sprint

• DoD of each single User story, included in the Sprint are met

• “to do’s” are completed

• All unit tests passing

• Product backlog updated

• Project deployed on the test environment identical to production platform

• Tests on devices/browsers listed in documentation passed

• Tests of backward compatibility passed

• The performance tests passed

• All bugs fixed

• Sprint marked as ready for the production deployment by the Product Owner

3.Definition of Done checklist for Release

• Code Complete

• Environments are prepared for release

• All unit & functional tests are green

• All the acceptance criterias are met

• QA is done & all issues resolved

• All “To Do” annotations must have been resolved

• OK from the team: UX designer, developer, software architect, project manager, product owner, QA, etc.

• Check that no unintegrated work in progress has been left in any development or staging environment.

• Check that TDD and continuous integration is verified and workingtion is verified and working

Funny, cause Jagex almost was never able to do said things. Yes, yes IK M/S and mobile are taking up a lot of resources, but then still even before there weren't barely small development cycles (most other companies that are agile are able to delivery every week, or have sprints of 2 to 4 weeks long to always promise their customers something). If Jagex truely wants to be agile a couple things need to happen.

1. Get rid of RuneScript. it is such a waste that probably new developers are likely to have a learning-curve about 1 or more months to learn it. Even different versions of Java have documentation how to use it. The same goes for other languages like C#, PHP, NodeJS and there's plenty more. But IDK how such thing is organized for RuneScript. I assume someone with a computer scientist degree would be competent enough to already have experience with a couple languages or else to learn a language quickly due to it being documented properly.

2. Since RuneScript should be gone, Jagex can finally do Unit Testing. Though the question is how good the developer can write their own tests for their own work.

3. Deprecate the Java client. It certainly will be a pain in the ass to still test this client as well NXT.

Originally posted by WafflCopterz

One poll. In my 2.5 months of playing this game there has been just one avenue for providing feedback to the Dev team: that poll from about a month ago.

You're trying to show that you're agile moving to a weekly release process but the true power of agile development is quickly receiving feedback from the last week of changes and being able to incorporate that into your currently prioritized backlog of work.

As of now there is no way for any players to know if their feedback is heard or even prioritized, even if it's low priority and wont be worked on for a year at least there would be indication that the team has read it and assessed it's importance.

The main issue I see with Jaggy and its community is the lack of transparency into Jagex's current workload. Why do you wait months to hear what we think about things? Why are you making it so negative posts upvoted to the top of Reddit are your only day-to-day feedback options? Increase the channels available between players and devs and you could see a lot of negativity lifted due to a simple understanding of your struggles. Without that, you're a black box.

Originally posted by Hawk4Face

I would say their approach to the smithing and mining update has been using the Agile methodology. It seems that separate depts and groups within jagex use different methodology’s, rather unfortunately...

Originally posted by TrumpGrabbedMyCat

Being a deliberate asshole here, you mean scrum or kanban right?