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Whether developing a simple indie title or a triple-A blockbuster, managing your team and project is essential to efficient games development.
There are plenty of project management solutions out there, but one that has proven to be popular with developers is the Swedish made Hansoft. This year, the team has released Hansoft 8, which aims to ensure that every member of the team is involved in how their game moves forward.
“Hansoft isn’t only used by the games development industry but also in electronics, aerospace, space, telecom
and cloud services,” says senior Hansoft coach Jon Leslie.
“Hansoft enables planning and collaboration. Members at all levels in organisations sized from less than ten employees to many thousands use Hansoft to do Scrum and tailored agile methods, Kanban, collaborative Gantt scheduling, defect tracking, document management, external party collaboration, long-term planning, real-time reporting, workload and portfolio analysis, among other things.”
Hansoft 8’s biggest improvements over its forebears is the combination of business intelligence with project management, bringing what the firm refers to as ‘actionable agile metrics’ to entire organisations. The result is that everyone at a studio can keep track of how a game’s development is progressing.
Leslie adds that the Hansoft team has also improved the software’s layout: “Decision-making on all levels, from the development team and the studio leadership, can now be supported by relevant data that can be visualised with iterative and collaborative dashboards.”
As an example, Hansoft 8 allows users to create, manage and share charts via these dashboards, depicting the progress of various aspects of the game in question. These charts can be generated in moments thanks to the handy Chart Wizard, which acts as a simplified version of the dashboard editor and is accessible while
in the middle of planning the project.
Other dashboard features include the ability to add pages, alter chart layouts and use reports as chart filters to find the data you’re looking for. Charts can also be saved locally in picture, PDF or spreadsheet form. But it doesn’t stop there: Hansoft will continue to update it every month based on user feedback.
Leslie adds: “We’ve integrated business intelligence into the tool and made it available for the whole organisation, and this is included in the licence.
“We believe the team empowerment nature of agile will drive a need for a democratisation of business intelligence throughout the organisation, as well as a need for BI tools to start catering for a more collaborative, iterative and agile approach to metrics.”
Hansoft 8 is available now. It’s free for up to nine users and can be downloaded from www.hansoft.com.
