Conclusion

So how would agile help the CEO of a game development studio? The first thing to point out is that Scrum is not going to convert your studio into a hit factory. Great games are made by talented developers. If you don’t have the right people, Scrum isn’t going to do you much good.

Scrum will make development at your studio a lot more transparent. When you adopt Scrum, you will experience a large surge of problems reported on a daily basis. This is due to the practices which encourage transparency. Some executives can’t handle this transparency very well. The flood of reported problems is interpreted to be a signal that Scrum has broken their studio and they need to revert back to their old methods. Others will tinker with the practices a bit until the noise quiets down. An example of this would be eliminating the daily scrum where all problems should be reported. Studios that are successful with Scrum understand that the transparency is extremely valuable and work to support it.

Another value to the studio CEO is the constant iterations of vertical slices of the game that show the value of the emerging game. There is no excuse that you should wait until alpha to know whether your game has a chance of being any good or not. The vertical slices being done should be prioritized not only on the value to the game, but to address concerns of risk and cost to the overall project. Are you concerned about the game being able to run on the PS3? Prioritize PS3 work early!

The bottom line is that Scrum creates transparency which allows you to make common sense decisions. If you ignore or do nothing about this transparency, then Scrum will do you no good. Scrum should never reach a state where no problems are reported either. It opens the door for continuous improvement which should become part of your culture. As you’ve seen in the last decade or more, the pace of change will not stand still. The way you make games should not stand still either.

About the Author

Clinton Keith is a Scrum coach and trainer for the video game development industry. Previously Clint worked for 15 years in the game development industry working on over a dozen titles. His website can be found at www.ClintonKeith.com. More information on scrum can be found at http://www.agilegamedevelopment.com/