Agile Game Development with Scrum

Deliver Better Games Faster, On Budget—And Make Game Development Fun Again!   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. Scrum and Agile methods are already revolutionizing development outside the game industry. Now, long-time game developer Clinton Keith shows exactly how to successfully apply these methods to the unique challenges of game development.   Keith has spent more than fifteen years developing games, seven of them with Scrum and agile methods. Drawing on this unparalleled expertise, he shows how teams can use Scrum 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.   You’ll learn to form successful agile teams that incorporate programmers, producers, artists, testers, and designers—and promote effective collaboration within and beyond those teams, throughout the entire process. From long-range planning to progress tracking and continuous integration, Keith offers dozens of tips, tricks, and solutions—all based firmly in reality and hard-won experience.   Coverage includes Understanding Scrum’s goals, roles, and practices in the context of game development Communicating and planning your game’s vision, features, and progress Using iterative techniques to put your game into a playable state every two to four weeks— even daily Helping all team participants succeed in their roles Restoring stability and predictability to the development process Managing ambiguous requirements in a fluid marketplace Scaling Scrum to large, geographically distributed development teams Getting started: overcoming inertia and integrating Scrum into your studio’s current processes Increasingly, game developers and managers are recognizing that things can’t go on the way they have in the past. Game development organizations need a far better way to work. Agile Game Development with Scrum gives them that—and brings the profitability, creativity, and fun back to game development.

Table of Contents:
Foreword         xvii Preface        xix Acknowledgments         xxiii About the Author         xxv   Part I: The Problem and the Solution        1 Chapter 1: The Crisis Facing Game Development         3 A Brief History of Game Development  4 The Crisis  10 A Silver Lining  11 Additional Reading  12   Chapter 2: Agile Development        13 Why Projects Are Hard         14 Why Use Agile for Game Development?  20 What an Agile Project Looks Like  28 The Challenge of Agile  32 Additional Reading  32   Part II: Scrum and Agile Planning        33 Chapter 3: Scrum         35 The History of Scrum  36 Scrum Parts  41 Scrum Roles  44 Customers and Stakeholders  54 Chickens and Pigs  55 Scaling Scrum  56 Summary  56 Additional Reading  57   Chapter 4: Sprints        59 The Big Picture  59 Planning  59 Tracking Progress  68 The Daily Scrum Meeting  74 Sprint Reviews  75 Retrospectives  78 Summary  84 Additional Reading  84   Chapter 5: User Stories  85 A Fateful Meeting  85 What Are User Stories?  87 Levels of Detail  88 Conditions of Satisfaction  90 Using Index Cards for User Stories  92 INVEST in User Stories  92 User Roles  97 Defining Done  99 Collecting Stories  100 Advantages of User Stories  103 Summary  105 Additional Reading  105   Chapter 6: Agile Planning  107 Why Agile Planning?  107 The Product Backlog  108 Estimating Story Size  112 Release Planning  117 Summary  124 Additional Reading  124   Part III: Agile Game Development         125 Chapter 7: Video Game Project Planning         127 Midnight Club Story  127 Minimum Required Feature Sets  128 The Need for Stages  130 The Development Stages  130 Mixing the Stages  132 Managing Stages with Releases  132 Production on an Agile Project  134 Summary  155 Additional Reading  155   Chapter 8: Teams         157 Great Teams  158 A Scrum Approach to Teams  159 Game Teams and Collaboration  168 Scaling and Distributing Scrum  173 Summary  188 Additional Reading  188   Chapter 9: Faster Iterations         189 Where Does Iteration Overhead Come From?  190 Measuring and Displaying Iteration Time  191 Personal and Build Iteration  193 Summary  201 Additional Reading  201   Part IV: Agile Disciplines         203 Chapter 10: Agile Technology         205 The Problems  205 An Agile Approach  210 Summary  220 Additional Reading  221   Chapter 11: Agile Art and Audio         223 The Problems We Are Solving with Agile  223 Concerns About Agile  225 Art Leadership  226 Art on a Cross-Discipline Team  227 Summary  232 Additional Reading  233   Chapter 12: Agile Design         235 The Problems  236 Designing with Scrum  237 Summary  247 Additional Reading  247   Chapter 13: Agile QA and Production        249 Agile QA  249 The Role of QA on an Agile Game Team  252 Agile Production  259 Summary  262 Additional Reading  263   Part V: Getting Started . 265 Chapter 14: The Myths and Challenges of Scrum  267 Silver Bullet Myths . 267 Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt  269 Scrum Challenges  273 Summary  281 Additional Reading  282   Chapter 15: Working with a Publisher         283 The Challenges  284 Building Trust, Allaying Fear  288 Agile Contracts  293 Summary  300 Additional Reading  300   Chapter 16: Launching Scrum         301 The Three Stages of Adoption  301 Adoption Strategies  317 Summary  324 Additional Reading  324   Conclusion         325 Bibliography        327 Index        329