Competition in the game industry market is fierce, and users have higher and higher requirements for game innovation and smooth experience, which poses great challenges to game enterprises. Rapid iteration and continuous delivery of stable, high quality products have become the core competitiveness of game development teams.

Today’s ** ONES Industry Practice ** focuses on r&d management practices in the games industry.

As a leading enterprise RESEARCH and development management tool in China, ONES has helped dozens of game enterprise customers to achieve efficient research and development and help enterprises to create high-quality games, with a deep understanding of the game industry research and development scene and practical experience. Take a well-known domestic integrated mobile game company as an example to see how ONES can help the game industry to achieve fast and stable delivery.

Customer background

The client is a well-known game research and development and distribution company in China. It owns a number of independent publishing brands and business lines, and its game operation business covers many countries and regions in the world, including Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, Japan and South Korea, Southeast Asia and North America. With the continuous expansion of business, the number of self-developed game projects increases, and the size of the team expands, the original extensive RESEARCH and development management mode is difficult to meet the needs of business development, and the RESEARCH and development management and team collaboration encounter many pain points:

  • Lack of standardized RESEARCH and development process, the responsibilities of various departments chaos

  • The tools within the team are scattered and the collaboration efficiency is low

  • Progress monitoring is difficult, resulting in project delays

Team managers quickly realized the need for a standardized development process and a tool to connect teams. After the research and trial of DOMESTIC and foreign R&D management tools such as Jira and ONES, the enterprise chose ONES as a unified R&D management platform for the team because of their one-stop management ability and more friendly user experience.

The needs of customers

The success or failure of a game project depends heavily on the willingness and response of players, which requires the r&d team to actively embrace changing needs, respond to customer feedback, and continue to iterate. Therefore, the game company adopts agile R&D management to cope with uncertain market demands, quickly launch and quickly iterate products based on feedback. Based on the analysis of the actual R&D scenarios and pain points of the enterprise, ONES clarified the r&d management requirements of customers:

  • Establish r & D process specification, and solidify in the tool, agile execution

  • Unified management tools, strengthen requirements and defect management, improve team collaboration efficiency

  • Visually manage project schedule to ensure on-time delivery

Research and development management practices in the ONES Game industry

To meet the needs of game enterprises, ONES provides a complete RESEARCH and development management scheme, and realizes scientific and efficient research and development process management.

Standardize the R&D process and define roles and responsibilities

The research and development of game products is an extremely complex process, from project approval to feasibility study and planning, to game planning, demand analysis, design, coding, testing, and finally game launch, operation and maintenance, which involves the collaboration between planning, art, RESEARCH and development, testing, operation and maintenance and other departments.

In order to ensure the efficient implementation of all aspects of game research and development, before the implementation of research and development management tools, it is more important to organize the research and development process and management norms, clarify the division of departments and roles, and help enterprise technical managers and project managers to establish professional research and development management thinking.

Combined with the actual business scenario of the company, ONES assisted it to complete the research and development process, and determined the responsible person and circulation rules of each link.

In the planning stage, the product manager will sort out the massive demands from the planning group and external users and input them into the demand pool. For complex requirements, sub-work items can be used to refine and disassemble requirements. After the requirements review, the team clarified the requirements priority and made the time estimate, divided the requirements into the corresponding version, and designated the task leader, and the task was transferred to the corresponding R & D engineer and entered the development stage. After the completion of the development, the tester builds and executes the test case. If the test fails, the feedback will be sent to the corresponding R&D engineer for repair.

Depositing the identified process specifications in the Team knowledge base of The ONES Wiki ensures that team members know and understand them. Then, the workflow is configured through ONES Project, and the process is solidified in the tool to realize automated and efficient operation.

ONES supports flexible custom workflows

Unified management tools, efficient collaboration

Decentralized tools can easily lead to team information silo, which increases cross-department communication costs and may lead to r&d accidents in serious cases.

The one-stop R&D management capability of ONES opens up the whole r&d process of demand-R&D, test-delivery, data exchange between products, and really connect different roles in the R&D team.

From the creation of requirements to the acceptance of online requirements, it involves the collaboration of multiple roles such as the requirement proposer, product manager, R&D, testing, etc. For game companies, frequent requirements changes further complicate requirements management and team collaboration.

Through the “requirements pool” component of The ONES Project, product managers are able to efficiently collect and comb through requirements from all parties. With the help of the customized field capability of ONES, requirement attributes (such as requirement source, priority, etc.) can be flexibly configured to regulate the requirement content.

After the requirements are sorted out, the product manager sets up the requirements workflow to get through the processing process of requirements from creation to art, RESEARCH and development, testing and other functions, so that the flow of requirements is interlinked and the requirements state can be traced.

ONES Project requirements management

In order to actively respond to changes in requirements that occur at any time during development, the team also needs to establish a set of requirements change specifications. When the change occurs, the product manager will evaluate the change requirements according to the specifications. If the evaluation is accepted, the change plan shall be output, and the time and resource changes caused by the change shall be synchronized with the relevant teams in time, and the demand plan and schedule shall be updated in the ONES Project to ensure the orderly progress of the Project.

The ONES Wiki precipitates and shares team knowledge

During the testing phase, defect management also requires effective collaboration between testers and developers to improve the team’s quality built-in capabilities. Test engineers make test plans, execute test cases, and feedback test results through ONES TestCase. Failed defect tasks can be submitted to associated tasks with one click, and the r&d personnel can quickly locate and repair defects.

Test data will be visually presented through test reports to help testers and managers analyze version quality and ensure high-quality delivery of the game.

ONES TestCase One-click submit defect

Test report

Manage progress visually to ensure project delivery on time

Game companies usually launch new products in important festivals, with the help of holiday hot spots to increase the popularity of games, thereby driving the growth of games and increasing revenue. In order to ensure the timely launch of the game, the game development needs accurate planning and execution, and the project manager needs to control the project progress in real time, and reasonably allocate resources to promote the success of the project.

At the daily station, the team intuitively understood the development progress of the game through The ONES Agile Kanban and burnout chart, and found and dealt with risks in time.

ONES burnout chart, track project progress

ONES Agile Kanban, managing value flow

In addition, Project managers can understand the work saturation of members and the time input of different game development projects through the ONES Project time report, and rationally allocate resources according to the priority of game launch to improve human efficiency.

ONES Time Report

Continuous improvement to create quality games

Only by improving the performance of the game development team can we continue to create a quality game experience for players. With the help of the report components provided by ONES Project, multi-dimensional data analysis was carried out, such as the demand delivery on time, the trend of defect creation and solution, defect distribution, etc., so that the manager could analyze the game version quality and team effectiveness, summarize problems and experience, and help the team to make continuous improvement.

ONES Project Multi-dimensional data report

Since the implementation of THE ONES RESEARCH and development management solution, the game enterprise’s RESEARCH and development process standardization, team cooperation efficiency has been significantly improved. During this time, the team also expanded, with more and more team members using ONES. According to the different development stages of the enterprise, THE ONES consultant team shares industry best practices with the enterprise to help the enterprise to succeed.