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.

In Agile Game Development , Clinton Keith offered game development team members the first complete blueprint for leveraging the power of Scrum and Agile methods to deliver games more efficiently, rapidly, and cost-effectively; create games that offer more entertainment value; and make life more fulfilling for every development team member. Now, reflecting his unsurpassed experience helping more than 150 game development studios succeed, Keith has thoroughly revamped his classic guide for today's radically transformed industry. The only Certified Scrum Trainer to help build 20 AAA-level games, Keith is singularly well-placed to help game developers solve the problems they actually face. In this edition, he: Addresses the modern challenges of mobile, free-to-play, and Massively Agile games Adds a completely new section on large-scale Agile game development, and new chapters on managing the first release, forming and leading Agile teams, game pipelines, and more Presents many new date stories about the experiences of actual game development teams, with actionable takeaways Illuminates advanced Agile projects through new "Things to Try" sidebars Covers Kanban and other Agile methodologies as well as Scrum Around the world, thousands of professional game developers have already used Agile Game Development to dramatically improve their effectiveness - and enjoy their work more. This 2nd Edition offers today's professionals even more value - no matter what types of games they're developing, what development roles they play, or what environments they're working in.

Building a successful product usually involves teams of people, and many choose the Scrum approach to aid in creating products that deliver the highest possible value. Implementing Scrum gives teams a collection of powerful ideas they can assemble to fit their needs and meet their goals. The ninety-four patterns contained within are elaborated nuggets of insight into Scrum’s building blocks, how they work, and how to use them. They offer novices a roadmap for starting from scratch, yet they help intermediate practitioners fine-tune or fortify their Scrum implementations. Experienced practitioners can use the patterns and supporting explanations to get a better understanding of how the parts of Scrum complement each other to solve common problems in product development. The patterns are written in the well-known Alexandrian form, whose roots in architecture and design have enjoyed broad application in the software world. The form organizes each pattern so you can navigate directly to organizational design tradeoffs or jump to the solution or rationale that makes the solution work. The patterns flow together naturally through the context sections at their beginning and end. Learn everything you need to know to master and implement Scrum one step at a time—the agile way.

Apply lean frameworks and other concepts of software development to the process of your game development. Resistance to Agile methodologies in the gaming industry is most often due to frustrated attempts to use lean tools and frameworks. Lean Game Development teaches you how to apply frameworks and concepts successfully to benefit you and your team. You will see how to manage, develop and coexist in a lean game development environment. You’ll understand what lean is and how it helps the gaming industry. You’ll see how to apply MVP concepts and why you should. The concepts taught are used not only in the design of the software code but also in all stages of the development process. Ideal for any game development company, including indie and small studios, Lean Game Development offers new opportunities for streamlining your workflow and benefiting your game development overall. What You'll Learn Discover how lean helps the gaming industry Understand the value of lean over Agile Apply MVP concepts to gaming industry Work with basic automated testing for gaming environment Who This Book Is For Game developers, artist, designers and project managers

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.

Pro Agile .NET Development with SCRUM guides you through a real-world ASP.NET project and shows how agile methodology is put into practice. There is plenty of literature on the theory behind agile methodologies, but no book on the market takes the concepts of agile practices and applies these in a practical manner to an end-to-end ASP.NET project, especially the estimating, requirements and management aspects of a project. Pro Agile .NET Development with SCRUM takes you through the initial stages of a project—gathering requirements and setting up an environment—through to the development and deployment stages using an agile iterative approach: namely, Scrum. In the book, you'll focus on delivering an enterprise-level ASP.NET project. Each chapter is in iterations or sprints, putting into practice the features of agile—user stories, test-driven development (TDD), behavior-driven development (BDD), continuous integration, user acceptance testing, extreme programming, Scrum, design patterns and principles, inside-out development, lean developent, KanBan boards, and more. An appendix features code katas designed for the reader to get up-to-speed with some of the features of extreme programming, while also showcasing popular open-source frameworks to assist in automated testing and mocking. In addition, popular open-source architectural foundation projects such as S#arp and NCommons are demonstrated to allow you to base future projects on these frameworks, which already have many best-practice design patterns and principles built in.

Thoroughly reviewed and eagerly anticipated by the agile community, User Stories Applied offers a requirements process that saves time, eliminates rework, and leads directly to better software. The best way to build software that meets users' needs is to begin with "user stories": simple, clear, brief descriptions of functionality that will be valuable to real users. In User Stories Applied, Mike Cohn provides you with a front-to-back blueprint for writing these user stories and weaving them into your development lifecycle. You'll learn what makes a great user story, and what makes a bad one. You'll discover practical ways to gather user stories, even when you can't speak with your users. Then, once you've compiled your user stories, Cohn shows how to organize them, prioritize them, and use them for planning, management, and testing. User role modeling: understanding what users have in common, and where they differ Gathering stories: user interviewing, questionnaires, observation, and workshops Working with managers, trainers, salespeople and other "proxies" Writing user stories for acceptance testing Using stories to prioritize, set schedules, and estimate release costs Includes end-of-chapter practice questions and exercises User Stories Applied will be invaluable to every software developer, tester, analyst, and manager working with any agile method: XP, Scrum... or even your own home-grown approach.

The rules and practices for Scrum—a simple process for managing complex projects—are few, straightforward, and easy to learn. But Scrum’s simplicity itself—its lack of prescription—can be disarming, and new practitioners often find themselves reverting to old project management habits and tools and yielding lesser results. In this illuminating series of case studies, Scrum co-creator and evangelist Ken Schwaber identifies the real-world lessons—the successes and failures—culled from his years of experience coaching companies in agile project management. Through them, you’ll understand how to use Scrum to solve complex problems and drive better results—delivering more valuable software faster. Gain the foundation in Scrum theory—and practice—you need to: Rein in even the most complex, unwieldy projects Effectively manage unknown or changing product requirements Simplify the chain of command with self-managing development teams Receive clearer specifications—and feedback—from customers Greatly reduce project planning time and required tools Build—and release—products in 30-day cycles so clients get deliverables earlier Avoid missteps by regularly inspecting, reporting on, and fine-tuning projects Support multiple teams working on a large-scale project from many geographic locations Maximize return on investment!