First of all. I won't explain Scrum, Continuous delivery/deployment.
If you know all those things this tutorial is not for you, because it just covers the basics.
Prerequisite 1
Let's start now with our setup.
First we need a tool to manage our tasks. You can select on of the following, or use an own one.
Atlassian.com (Jira, free for < 10 people)
Clickup.com check pricing
Asana.com free
Prerequisite 2
Define your release interval.
That can be everything 1 Week, 2 Weeks or even 1 Month? You should NOT change this value after again!
Step 1: Create and maintain your tasks
This should be done together with your team:
In first step write now down every feature you want to add as an own task.
When you did that open every task again, split it up in multiple small tasks. In ideal case one task should not take longer than 1 day to implement.
Asana. Source: Luna1.co
Step 2: Define release scope
Select as much tasks as your team can do in one interval.
In ideal case you have now one task per day. Select as many tasks as you think you team can manage in one Interval.
It's okay if you can not manage to do all of them. Specially on the first few tries you will delegate your team too much or too less work.
That's completly fine but this should NOT move your interval. It should still be released but with less tasks in it.
Step 3: Implementation
That's what your time know exactly how to do. But don't forget a task is done AFTER it is TESTED!
Step 4: Release
Your interval is over? Check which tasks are done and write a changelog. After you are done and can build your update and roll it out.
Talk with your team how the update was, did someone had a lot of stress? Or too less work? Talk about why not all taks were done if thats the case etc.
Then start over with Step 1. Tasks that weren't done are not automatically in the next release, so you ensure you can react fast if requirements changes (of course you can re-add them if nothing else became more important).
A few other things to mention:
Act as Team:
It's never a single persons fault!
Act everytime as team, no changelogs with "Person X implemented Y".
In worst case a person gets blamed by your community. Another bad thing is that no one else can work on the same stuff with that mindset.
Use Source control:
There are a lot of free tools, set up a server for GIT, SVN or my favorite Perforce (free for < 5 members).
All that tools are free and you can easily work together on the same source code.
Plus if a task is not done by release, you can easily revert committed stuff.
Perforce P4V Source Control
Take your time:
At start this steps will take a while, specially when you are a one-man or two-man team.
After some time it will be very easy to use this pattern, and the quality of your products will increase.
I'm sure when you have an early access title people will love the regular updates!
Visualize:
If you talk about your tasks and breaking them down there will be the moment you all have different ideas in your head.
Take a piece of paper or an digital whiteboard and draw your ideas. No one wants you to draw a perfectly fine piece of art, its just to help that everyone have the same image in their head.
Hope this helped you and gives you an idea how you could improve your development process.
It can look as easy as this, to get an common idea:
I hope this helped you. Try experimenting with those basics until it works for your team!
