Geek Night Manchester

How About Games? Extending Agile to Different Environments Francisco Trindade ThoughtWorks UK TW Geek Night Manchester – 22 nd Jan 2009

How Did I Get Here?
What Went Wrong?
A Survey of Problems in Game Development
Good Practices in Game Development Is The Game Industry That Bad?

Is the game industry so different?

It is…
different environment
motivated developers
cross functional teams
not just software development

It is…
different environment
motivated developers
cross functional teams
not just software development
But does it apply to everything?

Postmortems
Summary of project experience
“ The most severe blow suffered by all teams was from accepting an unrealistic schedule . Despite endemic problems, . . . the concept that was floated at the time was that it would be possible to adhere to the original schedule if everyone simply worked around the clock . Foolish and naıve, we bought it, and started pushing .”

How? Read Postmortems Analyzed Data Searched for problems

Problems Occurrence

Problems Occurrence Budget

Problems Occurrence Scope

Problems Occurrence Quality

Problems Occurrence Schedule

Problems Occurrence
Is there any major difference?
No All the main problems of the software industry are also found in the game industry

Would Agile be a good fit?

How? Read Postmortems Analyzed Data Searched for Best Practices

Best Practices

Best Practices
Agile is a good fit
Probably more than in the traditional industry

But how can we handle the different aspects? “ We cannot run selenium tests in a game…”

Well… Agile != Selenium Pair Programming Stand-ups Retrospectives

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it.
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more .

And this is already being discovered and used…

“As you review these practices it is important to remember that XP is NOT about automated unit-tests, a 40-hour work week, nor is it about pair programming”
“While most good XP teams do all of those things, they are simply the means to the end of delivering a great product. This is what XP is about ‚ delivering great games”
Bill Schofield Embracing Fun: Why Extreme Programming is Great for Game Development (http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20070301/schofield_01.shtml)

“ Large Animal has found that teams that are practicing agile need less guidance from senior designers and developers … as a result, Large Animal has been able to almost double the number of active project teams ”
“ This is the most important lesson that the Large Animal team has learned from agile; that they need to keep thinking creatively about how they work together and continuously try to improve their process ”
Bliksem Tobey A Year Of Agile Development http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=18162

“The hard lesson learned is that Scrum is not a silver bullet that makes video game product development more successful.”
“There are many technical details, know-how and best practices that have been gained by years of experience developing games, one development cycle after another , analyzing what went right and what went wrong ”
Paul Miller Top 10 Pitfalls Using Scrum Methodology for Video Game Development http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3724/top_10_pitfalls_using_scrum_.php

Well… Agile == making better games more consistently more frequently with less bugs and less staff turnover

Questions? Thanks! thoughtworks.co.uk franktrindade.com

Geek Night Manchester

by frankmt on Jan 23, 2009

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Geek Night Manchester — Presentation Transcript