Requiring Estimates for Everything!

This could just be the programming side of me that doesn't want to worry about estimates coming out too strongly, but it seems odd that managers want everything to be estimated ahead of time. The current item in question is knowledge transition. I'm leaving the company I'm currently working at and need to sit down with the developer taking my place. We've come up with a number of things to review and we've got about 10 days to do it in. So I'm trying to figure out what the estimate would be giving my manager.

I suspect the concern is that the project needs to continue moving forward even while we're working on this knowledge transfer. So they want to account for this time in the main project. So that we have an "accurate" end date for the project. My issue that I have not faith in any accuracy of my estimate. The project has been in the works for three years and during that time we've been working in fairly isolated roles. So while I'm really not certain what it's going to take for my replacement to pick up on the stuff. I almost forgot the other catch is that my replacement is part-time.

Hrm - I just don't see how beneficial having the estimate is in the grand scheme of the project.

Smorgasbord of games

John showed up first this past Thursday and after a quick bite of pizza we decide to sneak in a quick game of Carcassonne. We stayed fairly close through the game, but about a third of the way through John played his big meeple down for a nice bit of farming and I kept focusing on the city life. Towards the end of the game John had most of his meeples tied up and wasn't getting tiles that would allow him to score immediately. I was able to take advantage of several quick road scores and still had meeples for city placement which allowed me to pull ahead. In the end it was just enough as John's big meeple pulled in 36 points to end up 2 points behind me.

After that Chris, Jim and Colin showed up so we pulled out Through the Desert since we had never played with five people. It was a bit chaotic with nobody playing favorites as the game began Chris and Colin getting cut off from an oasis. Chris got himself a nice area blocked off on one side of the board and I got one on the other side. John did a good job getting to the oases, but failed to ensure he had the maximum number of one caravan. Thankfully I picked up that extra one, which combined with a nice blocked off area gave me the win. Scores were me 67, Jim 55, Chris 52, Colin 46 and John 40.

Chris had brought over my copy of Shadows Over Camelot which we hadn't played for a while so we set it up. We were having some poor luck with how the black cards were coming out with a number of grail cards followed by all of the Saxon cards (which hit Colin since he had gone there to fight them) interspersed with Excalibur cards. Four of us ended up at the grail quest and managed to take it out, but we lost Excalibur. Then the cards for the Lancelot quest came in quick turns and before anyone could get to it, it went down. I failed to pay attention to who the traitor might be and was beginning to think we didn't have one so when people started going for the Dragon quest and it was going to give us 7 white swords against 5 black I thought we had it. Sadly since it had been a while since we played we had all (except the traitorous John) forgotten the fact that an undiscovered traitor turns two white swords black. John ended up winning and the rest of us were miffed (especially Chris who had actually thought John was the traitor).

Then we finished with a game of Citadels. We've taken to playing to only six districts because eight seems to take too long and I've found the game stops being enjoyable at that point. Additionally, we prefer using the Emperor instead of the King and this time we also chose the Wizard instead of the Magician. The Thief and Assassin stayed hidden for several rounds during the game, but when they did appear Jim and I took the brunt (even though that was only being affected one round by each of them). Colin intimidated everyone by starting with a building that cost 6, but was worth 8 at the end. Chris was able to build three 4-point buildings in a row which gave a good foundation. I made the mistake of not taking the Emperor when I needed to leaving Chris (who was on my left) and John (who was to Chris' left) starting the round for most of the game. Which is probably why Chris won - the final scores were Chris 26, John 19, Colin 18, Jim 14 and myself 13.

Dragon Slaying

Tuesday night John and Colin joined me for some slaying of dragons when we played a couple games of Dungeoneer: Dragons of the Forsaken Desert. The first game saw John and I beating each other up with both of us more below 3 health than above. Unfortunately other than the excite in the first round of John and I repeatedly being near to dying the games came down to me getting lucky. In the first game I didn't like one of the quests I had been given, but I was able to get the destinations of the public quest and my other one near to each other. Then when the new public quest flipped up it happened to be in the same area as well and I was able to quickly finish the game.

In the second game I had two escort quests. My first quest pick up location came up quickly and Colin placed it as far away as he could, but I had a bane card that allowed me to swap a desert space with another one. So I moved it right next to the start and quickly completed it in one round. On my next turn I was able to place the remaining map cards which would allow me to complete my quests. On the next turn I completed both quests.

Being a role-player and having played many D&D sessions I love the concept of the game, but I have a feeling we're going to need to come up with some variations (which looking at the updated rules it looks like there are some worth trying) in order for this to be really enjoyable. Currently the game takes too long with too much luck in the cards drawn .

Blind Planning

So we finally pushed to try doing our development work in blocks of work that would be 6 weeks or less. We're also trying to push for the next block (yeah, I'd say iteration, but seems like a dirty word in my office place) to planned at the end of the first block. Unfortunately the project sponsors are looking for a project plan to be done and we have been unable to convince our project manager to put everything else in the next block as a place holder. This lead to our meeting this morning to attempt to plan out the remaining blocks of development. I suggested that if we were really going to do this that it might be better to actually have access to the requirement files so that we could double check details in the requirements instead of just a summary document (especially since the document we were attempting to plan from was not necessarily accurate with what it was showing since it is maintained separately). I got a flustered look and a restatement of the request.

Nice! My only hope is that the rest of the developers are also looking for coup and we just plan the next block after we get done the first one and let the project manager sort it out. Not the friendliest of approaches, but I feel unable to get our project manager to listen to any of our ideas.

Circle the game camels

This past Thursday I was joined by Jim, Colin and John and we played two games of Through the Desert followed by our constant closer, Carcassonne.

Colin hadn't played Through the Desert before and was still figuring it out. I ended up striking early and collecting a lot of high point water holes and making many oases connections. John and Jim both cordoned off a 10+ space area with one of their caravans. Fortunately I was able to get a couple small areas and longest in two of the colors and ended up with 84 points, just edging out John and Jim who tied at 81. Colin ended with 40 something.

The second game Colin had obviously learned what he had to and made a couple plays that blocked Jim and my caravans from getting to some oases. He also did a better job at ensuring he got to his own oasis and carving out a little area for himself. This time I was relying more on blocking of territory than connecting to oases. This worked well except that I realized too late that John was challenging me for the longest caravan in one of the two that I could actually do something with. When the dust settled we had each marked off a good sized area and each had at least one longest caravan. Jim got the extra one which proved the difference as he won with 82. Colin and John tied at 81 and I ended up with 79.

Carcassonne was an odd game. We generally have a much better farming area in the games we play, but because of an early profusion of roads, creation of larger cities and a mean play by Jim the meadow stayed fractured. John had started a city that I thought I'd try a quick take over of and put my large meeple (Gurn) into. John made it so he could tie a second one of his meeples in. Jim then played a tile that made it impossible for us to connect the two parts of the city and ever close them so Gurn and two of John's pieces were done for the game and we hadn't even played a third of the tiles. John and I went on a partnering frenzy after that completing a cathedral-ified city plus some other smaller ones a couple roads (including one we took over from Jim that had an inn on it). Jim was still doing well for him self throughout this. Colin unfortunately drew all but one or two of the monasteries and they came at a time when he would've preferred to try horning in on the cities being built. In the end Colin did manage to get 40 points from farming, but the rest of us had already made our points and I succeeded in edging out Jim with John just ahead of Colin.

Task Thrashing

I'm suffering from no clear direction by my project managers. I'm not sure if it is the way people have learned to do project management where I work of it is an issue with the project I'm on, but on regular basis what I'm asked for a status on changes. Unfortunately, it has nothing to do with previous tasks getting done.

I suspect this has something to do with the total chaos that is the requirements and there being no real prioritizing of them. Additionally there's no clear indicator of who needs to work on each requirement. Which I presume leads to complete confusion when trying to figure out what they are expecting to be done next.

I'm not sure what would be the biggest impact to getting clarity on this, but I suspect breaking down the requirements into smaller bite-sized chunks and letting the development team figure out who should work on them and not trying to assign them at requirement creation time might help.

Managers forget how it used to be...

Obviously this is not the case for everyone, but a colleague of mine who was a manager for a while before coming back to programming expressed that it is easy to forget what drives developers. Managers have their own sets of concerns that they need to drive for.

Document-itis

I'm currently on a project where it seems every time I turn around a new document has been created for a different way to view the same data. I'm not sure how to stem the tied of this swelling mountain of documents. Part of the issue is that the project is very far behind and management is desperately trying to bring in the hours yet still complete the work requested. So the thought of cleaning up the documentation and perhaps generating other views of the data gets shelved because we don't have enough time...even though we end up looking at data that is incorrect and making decisions off it because we didn't keep documents synchronized.

Managing game mail

This week John and Colin joined me for some gaming fun. We cracked open my copy of Thurn and Taxis for a couple games and finished with our typical closer - Carcassonne.

The first game of Thurn and Taxis I did a very good job of getting my houses down and getting carriages, but I didn't focus on getting points from the different territories. In fact the only one that I did well on was Baiern where I got the first one. I really thought that I was far behind and trying to play catchup, but I decided to close the game by putting my last house on which allowed me to be the only player with the final carriage. I ended up with a solid win. The one caveat was that Colin forgot he wouldn't get another play if I ended it and he could've put more of his houses down and got the final carriage which would've made for a closer game.

In the second game John and I started by putting our houses in several territories and Colin focused on Baiern. Afterward he conceded that he should have closed out sooner so that he could advance his carriage values instead of following in our tracks on the 7 length route. Other than that things were close between us through most of the game. Towards the end we started getting into the habit of using the Administrator to dump the city cards since we started getting more specialized in our desires. Unfortunately near the end of the game I was trying to get Salzburg to complete the orange area and I used the Administrator and wound up with two of them (if only I'd known that the next card was one!) in the city list. But after starting my route I need two turns with the Postal Carrier to get to 5 houses and another turn to play either two more our to use the Cartwright to get the final carriage. Unfortunately, John only needed two turns to end the game, which got him the win over me by 9 points.

In Carcassonne Colin is almost always strong with the farmers. Often times I ignore that and try going after all of the cities. This time I did put some of my meeples in the field only to have them overwhelmed by Colin's farming focus. Fortunately I was involved in the completion of both citadel cities (one with Colin, the other with John). Between those and a number of late game point sharing with John I was able to hold off Colin's 60+ point end-game surge by 9 points for the win.

Building villages, doing some shipping, then more building

John, Z and I gathered around the table and revisited the games from the last couple sessions and we each walked away with a win.

We started with Alhambra. This time around we all spent more time focusing on the walls for our city and after the first score we were within 5 points of each other. We got a little better separation in the next round where I started taking the lead being in first or second (or tied for those) for all but the red buildings. Before the end I was able to claim first in white and green, second in brown and red forced a three way tie for first in blue because I ended the game before Z was able to play his third blue to take first. Additionally, I was able to connect a split I created in my walls which helped offset Z getting 21 for his wall. So I wound up winning by about 10 points.

I'm looking forward to playing with four people, but I find the fact that the money and the buildings are random annoying. Perhaps I'll try focusing more on what money the other players are picking up, but I find my brain has been up to the task the last couple nights. :)

Next we played Manila. The first couple rounds a little roller coaster-ish. We all did well on the first round with Z being the harbor master. I ponied up for it the next time and everyone did poorly. John took over for the third round and we all did well again. After that I didn't bother spending enough to get it and focused on maximizing my returns. Z took a chance by trying to play different then John and I and ended up loosing money where we gained. He then spent too rounds trying to use the pirates to jump ahead, but lost his shirt instead. John stayed as harbor master since I wasn't willing to spend more than 12 pesos to try getting it from him. In the end, while I had more than 40 pesos than John his shares gave him 60 points and I only had 10 in shares. I think my frustration with harbor master is that the two times of been it I've rolled poorly for the ship that I've really wanted to do well and I end up needed to use the pilots and lose money in the process. I need to diversify my shares early on so I'm not so caught up on which boat makes it in.

Carcossonne wound up being a farmer battle between John and Z - I couldn't get in the mix and city sharing between Z and I. I missed Z getting into the farming so when we completed a city with a citadel in it for 45 points and shot ahead of John I had no way to reel Z back in. John and I were one tile away from completing another citadel city that would've given me the win, but Z got the piece that would've closed it.

A game night in Manila with Dragons

So another round of games with John, Z and I. Z showed up a little late, so John and I started a round of Dungeoneer: Dragons of the Forsaken Desert. We played with the #2 cards this time. The game started slow with John's personal quests involving killing a dragon - which he really needed either a level or some bonus cards to do - or rolling a three of a kind on three dice. I had an escort card and I can't remember the other card - bummer.

The map cards that I needed didn't come out for several turns while John got his out early. Unfortunately he had some difficulty rolling a three of a kind, which allowed me to get to where I needed and get my first quest completed. I then made the mistake of trying to get to the end right away by completeting the open quest and teleporting to the destination of my second quest. By this time John had completed his first. He then completed his second and since I was going to win on the next turn sent monsters after me then attacked me killing me before I could complete. Patience would have better served me since I had a movement of 6 and could've run to my destination instead. Oh well...

After Z joined us we played Manila. First off I hosed myself by not fighting hard enough for the harbor master in the first couple turns, then putting too much onto the Pirates - which is really a lucky shot at best. Additionally, I beat on the wrong boat too many times. In the end Z just edged out John, but we all felt that there was a little too much luck involved with just three players and were looking forward to trying again with four or five.

Building game cities

We had a slim group last night with John, Z and myself in attendance. Z had brought one of his games that he bought over the summer that had yet to be played, Alhambra. Z dominated us by winning two games of Alhambra and the final Carcassonne.

Alhambra is an enjoyable game that reminds me of Union Pacific. You can do one of three options on your turn, with one caveat: 1) Buy building tiles (which can be of six different types with varying costs); 2) Pick up money (which is of four different currencies); 3) Rearrange you alhambra. The caveat is that if you spend the exact amount of money required to buy a building you can select one of the three options again. There are two scoring cards that come from the money deck during the game and a final scoring at the end of the game. Each scoring round you count the number of a particular type of building each player has and score appropriately. Additionally, the building tiles have walls on them and you score points for the longest continuous stretch of wall.

During a players turn four buildings are available for purchase one for each type of currency there is. Four money cards are available of which the player may take only one card or all cards showing that total five or less. Since the buildings and money are randomly selected to replenish those available you have to be flexible with what you are willing to buy.