Some people may have their own opinions about the topic, but I suggest you use that which they have to get their opinion to make the decision for you. I think it’s easier to follow the designer’s opinion than to have the consensus of your team without any concrete answers.
It’s perfectly fine to use the opinion of your Arena Team as an alternate viewpoint to confirm or deny what the designer is saying. I advise you to do so without being too pushy.
You’ve probably heard all about the old saying “precision and speed” when it comes to design and assigning module arena to someone else. Those two concepts are certainly linked. The last thing you want to do is spend weeks on a project and then discover at the last minute that the area you assigned isn’t going to work, or worse yet that it’s not even implemented.
That happens far too often and unless it’s the type of problem where you have days off to help debug, the best thing to do when assigning module arena to someone else is to simply pay attention to it and fix it as soon as possible. On the contrary, you should only assign arena simulation to someone else if it’s necessary and they can be qualified to handle it.
For example, I’ve seen some teams that have a main programmer who is just very busy doing all sorts of different tasks like QA, programming and making sure everything is done, that they don’t follow up on any issues related to arena simulation until days before the deadline. When the time arrives, they’re clueless as to how to proceed.
In situations like that, the team should assign module arena to a programmer or another Arena Coordinator to see if they can complete the task. Once the programmer is assigned arena simulation work, he or she will get the opportunity to gain insight into the type of code they need to understand in order to make their code work properly. This will help everyone involved in the design process that much more.
There are plenty of scenarios where you could assign module arena to someone else, but I’d prefer to see it happen once or twice, instead of once every week. In many cases, it is so obvious that there’s no need to assign arena simulation to someone else, but sometimes it’s just too late for that to happen.
By the way, before you assign arena simulation to someone else, you should take some time to familiarize yourself with their knowledge of Arena design, their interest in coding issues and their knowledge of good practices. Sometimes it can be difficult to see where they’re lacking.
If you feel that you know that they are going to be up to the challenge and will deliver a better product, it’s time to start assigning arena simulation. Keep it to a minimum by keeping to the specs of Arena Design.
Once you’ve assigned arena simulation, you should be able to get a sense of whether they understand the constraints of the code you want to use in their Arena simulation. Then you can start implementing those constraints and make sure that it all makes sense.
Don’t think for a moment that you need to put your Arena Team through a training session to learn how to handle Arena design. Give them enough instruction and make sure that they have the basic understanding of what it means to implement the code and make sure that they know what all code is for, in addition to what it does.