You encounter unexpected technical issues in your VR project. How will you effectively manage your time?

When an issue arises in your VR project, it's essential to remain calm and quickly assess the situation. Start by evaluating the problem's scope—determine if it's a minor glitch or an indication of a more significant issue. By understanding the severity, you can prioritize your tasks and focus on actionable solutions, saving time and avoiding unnecessary troubleshooting. This methodical approach ensures you stay on track and address the most critical aspects of the problem efficiently.

Identify the Core Issue: Quickly diagnose the root cause of the technical problem by analysing symptoms and gathering input from the team. Prioritize Tasks: Determine which aspects of the issue require immediate attention and which can be scheduled for later, based on impact and urgency. Allocate Resources Efficiently: Assign the right team members to specific tasks based on their expertise to ensure swift resolution. Set Clear Deadlines: Establish short, achievable deadlines for each task to keep the team focused and motivated. Break Down the Problem: Divide the issue into smaller, manageable tasks to avoid overwhelming the team and to make tracking progress easier.

The most important thing at this point is to understand if the problem sits within hardware or software. Then it can be triaged and understood. if it is hardware- is the unit faulty, or does the hardware strategy need to change? If it is software, then which layer of the software, and what are the options for fixing it? Calm and throughout assessment is the key, there might be multiple different fixes to the problem.

When encountering unexpected technical issues in a VR project, it's crucial to establish MVPs immediately. In VR, performance is paramount, as dropping below the 120 frames per second threshold can lead to motion sickness. Prioritize fixes that ensure the application functions smoothly at this frame rate, focusing on the most essential components first. This approach helps streamline your workflow and prevent more significant setbacks to the project's timeline.

Rank Issues by Impact: Assess the severity of each technical issue and prioritize fixes that directly affect the core functionality or user experience of the VR project. Focus on High-Priority Bugs: Address critical bugs and glitches that could cause crashes, system failures, or significant usability problems first. Determine Quick Wins: Identify fixes that can be implemented quickly with minimal effort to improve stability and functionality, boosting team morale and user satisfaction. Consider Dependencies: Prioritize issues based on dependencies, ensuring foundational problems are resolved before tackling secondary issues that rely on them.

For this a simple triage of: can we release with this issue, come first. If the answer is yes, then see if a fix is viable in the timeline for the next release, and plan it in. If the answer is no, then just fix it.

For VR, if the problem is in software, a team of Technical artist, Senior software engineer, 3D artist and a QA engineer is the best to tackle the issue. Avoid assigning critical issues to one person. in VR, in most cases, the problem needs a cross-discipline approach.

VR solutions are complex convergence of technology & creative aspects of domain related processess, techniques, knowledge & best practices. Uncertainties in such a complex ecosystems are difficult to map, identify & isolate. Majority of productive time goes in isolating problem. Keeping a close watch on storyboard wireframes and desired end point is key. A rigorous plan early in design cycle & adhering to the set roadmap is key to achieving set goals. Effective documentation of plan vs actual implementation can be save a lot of time for debugging and knowledge management. This systematic process helps not only manage time effectively but also creates a record that can be invaluable for future troubleshooting & learning.

Make sure you are always testing performance across your supported hardware, so that you can address issues early. Require code reviews on PRs so that they can be critiqued before merge. Provide debug information in builds so you can identify errors in the codebase. In VR the effort to verify in editor and build is higher than the PC counter part, and emulation can't always catch everything. Test the build - daily.