10 words about the idea.

GTD scheduler in the form of a multiplayer RPG for development teams, here.

Short.

You all know what GTD is . Projects, Tasks, Mailstone and Deadlines. Many offices and development teams use this or that system based on (or not on the basis of) GTD to control tasks in projects in their daily work. I propose to replace the basic concepts of this methodology with the terms of multiplayer RPG, add buns, statistics, achievements, beauty and fan. We will get the same scheduler, but not so boring and with additional motivation.

Lol, is this a joke? Yes, it is, it is a joke. But in every joke, as they say, there is some joke.
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... Speaking of laziness and MMO, I now wonder if I had to get up for work so badly in the morning, if I was so lazy to go to pairs, if I needed a huge amount of effort to spend to force myself to finally open Flex Builder and finish this stupid project, Why have I not been receiving salaries for 4 months, got up at 6 am and “worked” all day in the game? ...

For those interested or those who are just curious - Wellcome for habrakat. But while the picture on the seed.

Long

Instead of entry.

I am by nature very lazy. I will not make excuses, they say half of the people here are also those lazy people, just saying that I am an extremely lazy creature. During my life, I managed to score many times on everything that can and cannot be, get lectures an hour before the exam, in passing finding out who our lecturer is, break a lot of time, get money and do a lot of nonsense. But at the same time, I must say, this laziness at times saves me, it can be said that they keep me for it. Laziness helps me not to be a monkey. For example, you need to do the task, it would take 40 hours. But I broke it to do 40 hours, and in 2 hours I think up how to get about the same result for 10 hours. Laziness is the engine of progress, friends!

MMO, tsiferki and work.

I used to play World of Warcraft in deep adolescence. He played a lot and, one might say, professionally. The game was essentially work, but they did not pay for it, but on the contrary, it ate up my small earnings. I was the one more, sorry for a purely game term, zadrot. Among my dubious achievements is the title of Grand Marshal, for those who do not know, it means “ who has no life who played 4 months in a row for 12–24 hours a day”. Speaking of laziness and MMO, I now wonder if I had to get up for work in the morning, if I was too lazy to go to pairs, if I needed a lot of effort to bring myself to finally open Flex Builder and finish this stupid project, why I did not receive salaries for 4 months, I got up at 6 am and “worked” all day in the game?

After all, sometimes that game, that work, require mostly mechanical actions with minimal brain involvement. Often, on the contrary, you need to quickly think and give birth to some ideas. Why is it more interesting to work in a game that has already turned into work?

The answer is simple - tsiferki, gentlemen! To interest the player, tricky game designers have ponapihali everywhere a variety of stats for typography and a sense of progress. I didn’t just clear the meadow from wolves, I killed 37 pieces of wolves and got 1000 reputations with hares for it. I didn’t just waste my day today, no, I’ve been pumping over 2,000,000 experiences and gained 3 levels. I didn’t just complete all the tasks for today, I completed 12 quests and killed 131 th mob. The player feels the progress and they can be measured with other players.

And in our work with you how? What have you done in the last Wednesday? Yeah, how many taskov. And how did you become cooler from that? Boss more satisfied with you? And how do you know? That is, "well, probably ..." yes?

This is where the motivation of the Lord is, every day during these 4 months I have seen my progress. And even 90% of the absolute monotony of what is happening did not knock me down. I knew that if I didn’t get up at 6 am today, I won’t get absolutely specific 50,000 points and won’t be able to take a completely concrete first place in a week and will have to spend another 2 weeks on this matter. I foresee comments on the salary as a motivation. Where is she your salary? Once or twice a month? It is somewhere far away, I don’t feel much of a difference if they tell me that it will be increased and in a month I will get 10% more (at the time of receiving I feel, yes). Now, if the salary was issued once a day in the evening.

Bottom line: the player in the IMO is motivated for non-mentally meaningful repetitive actions with tsiferki, statistics and visible progress.

Idea.

So, first we will try to build a one-to-one correspondence between the terms and practice of GTD and RPG for our GTDRPG ... MMOGTDRPG. I see it as a television announcer with a deadpan face trying to say it.



Customer.
So, the customer we will have a faction (or something like that), a fraction in WoW terms is a certain group of creature people with which you can download a reputation. For example, some elves, mountain pigs or cave bears. The higher the reputation, the more they have confidence in you, and you can take buns from them in the game. Performing tasks for the client, you increase your reputation with it. Accordingly, by breaking deadlines you decrease.

Project.
The project will be a dungeon (dungeon) or some separate area with resources, quests and mobs. To complete the project you need to go through milestones in terms of GTD. The project refers to the customer, that is, the faction.

Task
Task - this is a quest. Write a component, draw an animation, integrate animation - all these are atomic quests. Do this and complete the quest.

The milestone.
Milestone is essentially a set of quests, some kind of quest line. Complete 50 quests before the first of December, and you will have completed milestone. That is, Mylston is in different terms an epic quest or quest chain.

Resources.
Project resources, such as pictures, sounds, videos, text, will be danzhen / zone resources that need to be collected. Here's a quest for you - collect me 10 animations of a pink pig by 12 o'clock in the afternoon of Monday!

Bugs.
What a project without bugs, right. Bugs are mobs that need to be killed, and loot falls from them, or objects in simple language. Here's another quest - finally kill the boss, because of which I have IllegalOperationError pancake when building a BSP tree from this stupid model in the tupaya_model.3ds file.

It seems to have happened, but this is not all. Otherwise, we would have the same simple planner side view.

We, as in the IMO need tsiferki and motivation.

Reputation.
For completing quests, killing mobs, delivering quest chains on time, a player- employee gets a completely specific amount of reputation with the customer, with the boss, with the main programmer, finally. For disrupting deadlines, reputation decreases. The reputation of a working avatar of a person becomes beautiful, and I myself will be pleased to see that the client is happy with 936 out of 1000. What have I done today? Today I raised my reputation with a customer by 50.

Statistics.
Being (voluntary!) Statistics all around. How many projects I completed, how many lines of code I wrote, how many classes I created, how many quests I did and so on.

Progress.
Statisic accomplishments are made. ABOUT! You wrote 1000th grade! Congratulations! You have a green badge on your chest. A variety of achievements can be made kuyev huchu. Nothing tangible, but nice. How many of you stay at work to finally add the number of rows to 10,000, to get an achievement, and satisfied to go home to sleep?

Skills.
Each of you has some set of skills related to work. Programming, in it subskills ActionScript 3, PHP, Ruby, in them there Papervision3d and Box2d and other libraries. For example, I am currently working on a quest that requires knowledge of the skills of ActonScript 3 and Papervision3d. Therefore, I improve my skills in these skills. Accordingly, in the quests I indicate that I work with these skills, and they grow in numbers. Other skills that have not been used for a long time are reduced (forgotten) to a certain minimum level, is it logical? I can open the panel and see, aha, here I know everything perfectly, but here I am starting to forget things. We urgently need to do something in Ruby.

Things.
Things have a purely decorative value, but nevertheless, rewarding the developer with Super Blade Awesome for some merit has some encouraging meaning.

Bottom line: I defined the concepts and possible parameters of development, and also briefly mentioned additional motivation.

Lecture hall.

I do not undertake to say that people like me are everything. No, but I know for sure that there are a lot of similar people. And they do not necessarily play MMOs now, although they are very susceptible to MMO addiction, and if you know such people, it’s better not to show them these games.

The potential audience includes lonely developers and small development teams that are already using GTD or want to start, especially in the game development industry. The transition from boring task management software to fun software is justified. If the team does not use GTD, then the introduction of such a system seems inappropriate. I foresee questions, they say, and so there is not enough time, there are still some quests to fill in, follow all of this. Surely, you are not using GTD, because there you have to do exactly the same thing.

The larger the team, the greater the likelihood that this idea will not go because of too serious people who will not like this thing.

The bottom line : indie developers and small teams.

Functions.

This scheduler offers all the same functions as a regular GTD scheduler and adds elements of multiplayer RPG games to them. This will make the workflow less tedious, add some meta elements above the tasks of controlling tasks. Virtual encouragement, statistics, a person will immediately see the result of their work in some tsiferki. After a hard day’s work, I can sit and admire a skill that has grown up by 5, for example, OOP and Ruby. Trifle, but nice.



From now on, this picture can be interpreted in a new way! I, my friends, Flash Developer 80 th level, and it sounds good!



Project management, creating / editing tasks. Everything is done in a convenient visual interface without stupid clicks on a bunch of pages with strange input fields.


Easy access to the state of various parameters, again more tsiferok and graphics. We turn the boring process of managing tasks into an interesting one.


View current project tasks, statistics on them.


Flow chart on projects.


You can create groups for the so-called group quests. For example, I’ve got a group quest with a designer - finally to insert a pink pig with a flower into a flash drive. This is a task for two of us. Visualize the task chains as quest chains with convenient display of the tree, status and progress.



Separately, I want to mention the automatic statistics collection, which can be integrated into the development as an Eclipse plugin or Ant task.

Outcome : showed my vision of the interface, functions and process.

Problems.

The main problem of this approach is subjectivity. Everyone has different projects and tasks. Therefore, it makes no sense to compare my progress and the progress of Vasya, who works in New Zealand. That is, the global customer service will not work. If I want to, I’m going to do light quests for myself and go up to level 100,500, and honest Peter will do his complex quests at level 7.

Therefore, I chose small groups of developers as an audience of singles. Then if anyone begins to read, the people will come up and knock on the head. In a small team, such a system can be very interesting and help improve productivity. On the other hand, at the beginning I mentioned about the comparison of achievements, that without mass character it is not possible. And again, starting from honest and subjectivity, some top and some comparisons can still be made. At least according to statistics, which is collected automatically.

Another issue is the “seriousness” of such a decision. It is clear that the management system should be used by all developers, but if someone seems to be too childish (what? Elves? Quests? Yes, you cho oher there ...), then the whole process goes to the cat's tail.

Anticipating the issues, as I said, I will not put problems with the GTD methodology, on which this idea is based, into problems.

The bottom line : everything is subjective.

How to earn.

From all the above, you can make a sad conclusion and change the name of this part to "How not to make money.", Because the system turns out very narrowly focused. You can't make a big service for everyone, micropayments for gaming things are for young idiots on VKontakte, and we are here to work with you.

You can take a little money for hosting the system on your servers, as usual GTD solutions do. You can think of something in the question of customization for individual orders, for example, to remake everything under the StarCraft universe.

Bottom line : apparently, millions can not do here.

A couple of words.

Comrade ooprizrakoo expressed an interesting idea - to try to make a skin for the existing system project management. Whoever wants, let him use, the rest will work in the old age. Additional data stored somewhere separately.

PS

As I said, in every joke there is some joke. Who liked - plus, who did not like - plus.

And remember, if something like “Vasya, let's go on a quest to do this IllegalOperation Error of the boss?” Sounds unimaginably strange to you in the workflow, then after “Wait a moment, I have dried pepper ...” I’m not surprised at anything.