Agile Game Development: Build, Play, Repeat / Edition 2

by Clinton Keith

Overview

The definitive guide to more effective and personally fulfilling game development with Agile Methods—now revamped to reflect ten more years of experience and improvements




Game development is in crisis—facing bloated budgets, impossible schedules, unmanageable complexity, and death-march overtime. It's no wonder so many development studios are struggling to survive. Fortunately, there is a solution. Agile and Lean methods have revolutionized development in the game development industry. In Agile Game Development, long-time game developer and consultant Clinton Keith shows exactly how these methods have been successfully applied to the unique challenges of modern game development.




Clint has spent more than 25 years developing games and training and coaching hundreds of game development teams. Drawing on this unparalleled expertise, he shows how teams can use the practices of Scrum and Kanban, customized to game development, to deliver games more efficiently, rapidly, and cost-effectively; craft games that offer more entertainment value; and make life more fulfilling for development teams at the same time.

• Contains several new chapters on live games, leadership, and coaching, including an all-new section on Agile for large teams of up to 1000 developers
• Updates to all chapters to reflect a decade of experience with more than 200 studios
• Now covering Kanban and other Agile approaches alongside Scrum
• Understanding Agile goals, roles, and practices in the context of game development
• Discovering how Agile benefits every specialty in game development from art to QA
• Communicating and planning your game's vision, features, and progress

Game developers and leaders are recognizing the modern challenges of gaming. Game development organizations need a far better way to work. Agile Game Development gives them that—and brings the profitability, creativity, and fun back to game development.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780136527817
Publisher:	Pearson Education
Publication date:	07/09/2020
Series:	Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Cohn)
Edition description:	2nd ed.
Pages:	576
Product dimensions:	6.90(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Over the course of 35 years, Clinton Keith has gone from programming avionics for advanced fighter jets and underwater robots to developing and leading on hit video game titles such as Midtown Madness, Midnight Club, and Darkwatch, among a dozen others as a CTO and Director of Product Development. He introduced the video game industry to Agile practices in 2003 and now trains and coaches video game teams. Clinton is the author of the first edition of this book, Agile Game Development with Scrum, and co-author of Gear Up! Advanced Game Practices. His website is www.ClintonKeith.com.

Table of Contents

Foreword xxvii


Preface xxix


Part I: The Problem and the Solution 1


Chapter 1: The Crisis Facing Game Development 3


The Solutions in This Chapter 3


A Brief History of Game Development 4


Iterating on Arcade Games 5


Early Methodologies 6


The Death of the Hit-or-Miss Model 8


The Crisis 9


Less Innovation 9


Less Value 10


Work Environment 10


Mobile/Live Challenges 10


What Good Looks Like 11


Summary 12


Additional Reading 12


Chapter 2: Agile and Lean Development 13


The Solutions in This Chapter 13


What Is Agile? 13


What Is Lean? 14


Why Game Development Is Hard 16


Learning from Postmortems 16


The Problems 19


Applying Both Agile and Lean 23


Why Use Agile and Lean for Game Development? 24


Cost and Quality 24


Finding the Fun First 25


Iterate More, Fail Fast 26


Agile Values Applied to Game Development 27


Lean Principles Applied to Game Development 30


What an Agile Project Looks Like 33


Agile Development 35


Projects Versus Live Development 36


Pre-Deployment Releases 37


The Challenge of Agile and Lean 37


What Good Looks Like 38


Summary 38


Additional Reading 38


Part II: Scrum and Kanban 39


Chapter 3: Scrum 41


The Solutions in This Chapter 42


The History of Scrum 43


The Big Picture 44


The Values of Scrum 47


The Principles of Scrum 47


Product Backlog, Sprints, and Releases 48


The Product Backlog 48


Sprints 50


Releases 51


Scrum Roles 52


The Scrum Team 52


Development Team 54


Scrum Master 54


Product Owner 59


Customers and Stakeholders 62


Chickens and Pigs 64


Scaling Scrum 65


What Good Looks Like 65


Summary 65


Additional Reading 65


Chapter 4: Sprints 67


The Solutions in This Chapter 67


The Big Picture 67


Planning 68


The Sprint Goal 69


Part One: Identifying the Sprint Goal 69


Part Two: Planning How to Achieve the Sprint Goal 70


Length 74


Tracking Progress 78


Task Cards 78


Burndown Chart 79


The Burndown Trend 80


Task Board 82


War Room 84


The Daily Scrum Meeting 84


The Practice 84


Improving the Daily Scrum 86


Sprint Reviews 88


Review Format for Smaller Games 88


Remote Stakeholders 89


Studio Stakeholders 90


Players 90


Honest Feedback 90


Retrospectives 90


The Meeting 91


Posting and Tracking Results 92


Sprint Challenges 92


Sprint Interrupted 93


Sprint Resets 93


Problems with the Sprint Goal 94


Running Out of Work 96


What Good Looks Like 96


Summary 97


Additional Reading 97


Chapter 5: Great Teams 99


What Are Great Teams? 100


The Solutions in This Chapter 101


An Agile Approach to Teams 101


Cross-Discipline Teams 102


Generalizing Specialists 104


Self-Management 105


Team Size 105


What Good Looks Like 108


Summary 109


Additional Reading 110


Chapter 6: Kanban 111


The Solutions in This Chapter 111


What Is Kanban? 112


Visualizing the Workflow 112


Measuring the Workflow 113


Managing the Workflow 114


Improving the Workflow 117


Reducing Batch Sizes and Waste 117


Reducing Handoffs 118


Responding to Bottlenecks 118


The Difference with Scrum 120


What Good Looks Like 121


Summary 121


Additional Reading 122


Chapter 7: The Product Backlog 123


The Solutions in This Chapter 123


A Fateful Meeting 124


Why Design Documents Fail 125


The Product Backlog 126


Product Backlog Items 126


Ordering the Product Backlog 127


Continual Planning 128


Allowing for Change and Emergence 128


Encouraging Team Engagement and Alignment 129


Creating the Product Backlog 129


Managing the Product Backlog 131


Backlog Refinement 131


Who Attends the Refinement and When? 132


Techniques for Ordering the Product Backlog 132


Defining “Done” 137


Types of Debt 137


Managing Debt 138


Development DoDs and Stakeholder DoDs 139


QA and DoDs 140


Sets of Done 141


Challenges 142


Dysfunctional Product Ownership 142


The Proxy Product Owner 144


Product Owner Committees 144


Silo Product Owners 145


Attention Deficit Product Owner 146


Tunnel Vision Product Owner 147


Distant Product Owner 149


What Good Looks Like 152


Summary 152


Additional Reading 153


Part III: Agile Game Development 155


Chapter 8: User Stories 157


Speaking Different Languages 158


The Solutions in This Chapter 158


What Are User Stories? 159


Levels of Detail 160


Acceptance Criteria 161


Using Index Cards for User Stories 163


INVEST in User Stories 164


Independent 164


Negotiable 165


Valuable 166


Estimable 167


Sized Appropriately 168


Testable 168


User Roles 169


Collecting Stories 171


Splitting Stories 174


Split Along Research or Prototype Dependencies 175


Split Along Conjunctions 175


Split by Progression or Value 176


Other Splitting Tips 176


Advantages of User Stories 176


Face-to-Face Communication 177


Everyone Can Understand User Stories 177


What Good Looks Like 178


Summary 179


Additional Reading 179


Chapter 9: Agile Release Planning 181


The Solutions in This Chapter 181


What Is Release Planning? 182


Release Planning Meetings 183


Chartering a Shared Vision 184


Estimating Feature Size 186


Velocity 186


How Much Effort Should We Spend Estimating? 187


Where Are Story Sizes Estimated? 188


Story Points 189


Alternatives to Story Points 194


Release Planning with Story Points 195


Updating the Release Plan 197


Marketing Demos and Hardening Sprints 198


What Good Looks Like 200


Summary 200


Additional Reading 201


Chapter 10: Video Game Project Management 203


Midnight Club Story 203


The Solutions in This Chapter 204


Minimum Viable Game 205


Contracts 207


Hitting Fixed Ship Dates 208


Managing Risk 209


Incorporating Risk in the Product Backlog 210


The Need for Stages 211


The Development Stages 212


Mixing the Stages 213


Managing Stages with Releases 214


Lean Production 215


Production Debt 216


The Challenge of Scrum in Production 218


Lean Production with Kanban 220


Working with Scrum 234


Transitioning Scrum Teams 235


What Good Looks Like 235


Summary 236


Additional Reading 236


Chapter 11: Faster Iterations 237


The Solutions in This Chapter 238


Where Does Iteration Overhead Come From? 238


Measuring and Displaying Iteration Time 239


Measuring Iteration Times 239


Displaying Iteration Times 240


Personal and Build Iteration 241


Personal Iteration 241


Build Iteration 242


What Good Looks Like 250


Summary 250


Additional Reading 250


Part IV: Agile Disciplines 251


Chapter 12: Agile Technology 253


The Solutions in This Chapter 254


The Problems 254


Uncertainty 254


Change Causes Problems 255


Cost of Late Change 256


Too Much Architecture Up Front 257


An Agile Approach 258


Extreme Programming (XP) 259


Debugging 265


Optimization 266


What Good Looks Like 269


Summary 270


Additional Reading 270


Chapter 13: Agile Art and Audio 271


The Solutions in This Chapter 271


Concerns About Agile 273


Art Leadership 274


Art on a Cross-Discipline Team 275


Creative Tension 275


Art QA 276


Building Art Knowledge 277


Overcoming the “Not Done Yet” Syndrome 278


Budgets 279


Audio at the “End of the Chain” 280


Shifting to Kanban 281


What Good Looks Like 281


Summary 282


Additional Reading 282


Chapter 14: Agile Design 283


The Solutions in This Chapter 284


Designs Do Not Create Knowledge 284


The Game Emerges at the End 285


Designing with Scrum 286


A Designer for Every Team? 286


The Role of Documentation 286


Parts on the Garage Floor 288


Set-Based Design 291


Lead Designer Role 295


Designer as Product Owner? 295


What Good Looks Like 296


Summary 296


Additional Reading 296


Chapter 15: Agile QA and Production 297


Agile QA 297


The Solutions in This Chapter 298


The Problem with QA 298


Most QA Is Just QC 299


Agile Testing Is Not a Phase 300


The Role of QA on an Agile Game Team 301


QA, Embedded or in Pools? 303


How Many Testers per Team? 303


Using a Bug Database 304


Play-Testing 305


The Future of QA 307


Agile Production 307


The Role of a Producer on an Agile Project 308


Producer as Scrum Master 309


Producer as Product Owner Support 309


Producer as Product Owner 310


The Future of Production 311


What Good Looks Like 311


Summary 311


Additional Reading 312


Part V: Getting Started 313


Chapter 16: The Myths and Challenges of Scrum 315


The Solutions in This Chapter 315


Silver Bullet Myths 316


Scrum Will Solve All of Your Problems for You 316


Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt 316


Scrum Challenges 321


Scrum as a Tool for Process and Culture Change 321


Scrum Is About Adding Value, Not Task Tracking 323


Status Quo Versus Continual Improvement 323


Cargo Cult Scrum 324


Scrum Is Not for Everyone 326


Overtime 326


Crunch 327


What Good Looks Like 329


Summary 330


Additional Reading 330


Chapter 17: Working with Stakeholders 331


The Solutions in This Chapter 332


Who Are the Stakeholders? 332


The Challenges 332


Focus Comes Too Late 333


Milestone Payments and Collaboration 334


Limited Iteration 335


First-Party Problems 335


Portfolios Drive Dates 336


Building Trust, Allaying Fear 337


The Fears 337


Understanding Agile 338


Publisher-Side Product Owners 339


Meeting Project Challenges Early 340


Managing the Production Plan 341


Allaying the Fears 342


Agile Contracts 342


Iterating Against a Plan 344


Fixed Ship Dates 345


Agile Pre-Production 348


The Stage-Gate Model 348


What Good Looks Like 350


Summary 350


Additional Reading 351


Chapter 18: Team Transformations 353


The Solutions in This Chapter 353


The Three Stages of Team Transformation 353


The Apprentice Stage 355


The Journeyman Stage 359


The Master Stage 367


What Good Looks Like 369


Summary 370


Additional Reading 370


Part VI: Growing Beyond 371


Chapter 19: Coaching Teams for Greatness 373


What Is a “Great Team”? 373


Why Coaching? 374


The Solutions in This Chapter 374


Coaching Skills 374


My Path to Coaching 374


The Coaching Stance 375


Facilitation 377


Coaching Tools 379


Coaching Teams to Higher Performance 381


Psychological Safety 381


Common Goals 382


Shared Accountability 382


Working Agreement 382


Root Cause Analysis 383


Team Maturity Models 384


The Five Dysfunctions of a Team 384


The Tuckman Model 385


Situational Leadership 386


Coaching Tools and Practices 387


Lighten the Mood 387


Love Card Wall 388


Notes of Encouragement 389


PechaKucha Introductions 389


Socialize the Team 390


Measure Team Health 391


Group Confession 391


360 Reviews 392


What Good Looks Like 393


Summary 393


Additional Reading 393


Chapter 20: Self-Organization and Leadership 395


The Solutions in This Chapter 396


Self-Organization 396


Valve Software 397


Supercell 398


Growing Teams 399


Leadership 403


Agile Leadership 403


Studio Leadership 404


Discipline Leadership 405


Director Roles 406


Mentors 407


Reviews 407


Servant Leadership 408


Systems Thinking 409


Turning a Vicious Cycle into a Virtuous Cycle 409


Seeking Out Systems 411


Intrinsic Motivation 411


Autonomy 412


Mastery 412


Purpose 412


Flow 412


Finding the Right Challenge 414


Increasing Skills 414


Studio Coaches 415


Shifting Roles 416


Large-Scale Scrum: More with LeSS 417


Adoption Strategies 418


Beachhead Teams 419


Full-Scale Deployment 422


What Good Looks Like 426


Summary 426


Additional Reading 426


Chapter 21: Scaling Agile Game Teams 429


The Solutions in This Chapter 429


Challenges to Scaling 430


Loss of Vision 430


Adding People Late 431


Communication Among Large Teams 431


Should You Scale Up? 433


Scaling the Wrong Process 433


The MAGE Framework 434


Whole Game Focus 435


Communication, Purpose, and Autonomy 435


Systems Thinking 435


Scaling the Right Way 436


The Product Backlog 436


Tools and Mind Maps 436


Pooling Functions and Dispersing Components 437


Pillars 438


Team Organization 438


Feature Teams 438


Component Teams 439


Production Teams 439


Support Teams 440


Tool Teams 442


Pool Teams 443


Integration Teams 443


Feature Area Teams 443


Communities of Practice 444


Product Ownership 445


Additional Roles 447


Project Management Support 447


Supplemental Roles 448


Pillar Champions 448


Releases 448


Release Planning 449


Rolling Out the Release Plan 451


Forming Teams 452


Updating the Release Plan 452


Using Project Boards 453


Sprints 454


Aligning Sprint Dates 454


The Scrum of Scrums 455


Sprint Planning 458


Sprint Reviews 458


Sprint Retrospectives 459


Managing Dependencies 460


Team Formation 461


Release Planning 461


Team Dependency Management 462


Reducing Expert Dependencies 462


Distributed and Dispersed Development 463


Distributed versus Dispersed 463


Challenges to Distributed Development 464


Challenges to Dispersed Development 466


What Good Looks Like 468


Summary 468


Additional Reading 469


Chapter 22: Live Game Development 471


The Solutions in This Chapter 472


Games As a Service 472


Why Agility for Live Games? 473


DevOps and Lean Startup 473


Feedback Loops 474


Live Games and Fighter Aircraft 474


Live Game Feedback Loops 475


Measuring the Feedback Loop 478


Part One: Plan 478


Have a Vision 479


Model the Players 479


Establish the Goals 480


Identify an Incremental Step 480


Develop the Hypothesis 480


Part Two: Develop 482


Map and Measure the Entire Pipeline 482


Identify Ways to Improve the Pipeline 483


Reduce the Batch Size 485


QA for Live Games 487


Part Three: Deploy and Support 487


Continuous Delivery 488


Live Support Tools 490


Part Four: Measure and Learn 494


Measure Results 494


Do Retrospective Actuals and Update Your Vision 495


What Good Looks Like 495


Summary 496


Additional Reading 496


Chapter 23: There Are No “Best” Practices 497


The Solutions in This Chapter 497


Visualizing Your Work 498


Feature Boards 498


Story Mapping 501


Developing for New Platforms 504


Launch Title Development 505


Parallel Development 506


Agile and Indie Game Development508


The Draw of Indie Development 508


The Challenges of Indie Development 509


How Agile Development Helps 509


What Good Looks Like 510


Summary 511


Additional Reading 511


Conclusion 513


Index 515