Great is not enough for you anymore? Let's see how we can crank it up to Outstanding!
Team Composition
So, you're ready to start development on new software. After selecting the desired type of software and its features, you can notice in the details panel of that software that there are two pie charts - one for code, one for art -, an estimate amount for code and art, as well as recommended number of programmers, designers, artists.
Opening up the team and employee management screens, you need to look that the team which is assigned to develop the software at hand has the following:
- The team has a high enough expertise threshold. The team management screen has a slider that is set to 0% by default, and that means that your programmers which are qualified in one area of expertise will also write bad code in other areas, raising the bar prevents them from doing so, watch out not to raise the bar too much or sometimes coupled with skill decay some of your programmers might end up unqualified to do any work.
- At least one qualified programmer and designer per distinct code pie slice. At least one qualified artist per distinct art pie slice. This ties in to the first point.
- Their qualification level (AKA skill) should be maxed if possible, however there are ways to inflate skill without actually needing to send the programmers, artists and designers to school: bookshelves and team leaders. Bookshelves provide a static bonus per room and team leaders take some time from the team work day to arrange a daily meeting which provides skill buffs for the team.
Design and Development
We got the ball rolling, now we're at design stage. Design progresses until it reaches maximum but it can degrade from then on so you have to be ready to click on the Develop button as soon as it starts flashing red. If your designers aren't skilled enough they won't produce Outstanding design which limits the ability of your software to ever be Outstanding.
In the programming stage, you'd want to aim for a code amount that's about 101% of the estimated code, for example if you get an estimate of 20 you can get to 20.20 and that actually increases the chance of the code getting Outstanding rather than promoting at the exact estimate number.
Try not to have too many programmers of the same qualification working on the same code, it tends to reduce overall quality. That three shift team group is perfect for marketing and support but for development it's the equivalent of 9 women giving birth to a baby in 1 month gestation period.
You can order reviews to check the progress. Outsourced reviews are typically less biased but come at financial cost. Once you promote to beta the software cannot get worse. After promoting from alpha the dev team can be relocated to other projects as you can assign beta to non-stop support teams. Clean that software until you're getting fewer than 10 bugs per month.
Myths about Outstanding Quality
This section is made especially because the game's mechanics have changed and there is a lot of conflicting info lying around on this subject. I'll just note what I found regarding some myths being circulated:
- Price has no bearing on quality.
- You don't need Outstanding tools to create Outstanding software.
- Overcoding your application is preferred to undercoding it.
- Outstanding quality is set for software that has quality over 93%.
- Stress factors like noise, heat, cold, or bad chemistry between team members impacts quality and effectiveness.