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.

Clinton Keith is an independent agile coach and Certified Scrum Trainer who helps game developers and nongame developers alike adopt Scrum, Extreme Programming, kanban, and other agile practices to greatly improve their productivity, workplace, and product quality.

Over the course of 25 years, Clint has gone from programming avionics for advanced fighter jets and underwater robots to overseeing programming for hit video games such as Midtown Madness and Midnight Club. Clint has been a programmer, project director, CTO, and director of product development at several studios. Through a series of presentations and his popular blog, Clint introduced the video game industry to Scrum in 2005. As CTO, Clint helped High Moon Studios achieve a place on IT Week Magazine’s Top 50 Technology Innovators list in 2005 and 2006 and win several of San Diego Society for HR Management’s Workplace Excellence Awards in 2005, 2006, and 2007.

For more information, visit www.ClintonKeith.com.