“Poor communication was later identified as a major source of production issues, and it also allowed me to be largely in the dark on the state of the project during development. By my reckoning there were two main ways that information about progress flowed from the top down to developers in the trenches like me. The first was production milestones, which as far as I can remember were all reported as having been hit on time, and I later learned that these had not been signed off on by the QA department — that’s Quality Assurance, responsible for game testing — who did not agree that the state of the game reflected those milestones. In other words, it seems that production leads were failing to report on those milestones being missed, despite QA reports that made it clear.”