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Using Agile Methodologies To Make Games?
simoniker writes "Using Agile methodologies for programming is a concept that's been around for a while now, but some firms are now applying the concept to video game development." There has been a lot of talk lately about what the 'next big thing' in development will be. Could this be it? Or is this just another step along the way? From the article: "Agile puts the emphasis on producing demonstrable iterations of a game almost immediately into production, creating prioritized vertical slices that iterate on the most critical elements and features. The method also puts great emphasis on the organization of teams and the relationships therein, as well as the cycles in which teams must plan and carry out their project objectives."
And so started a cycle of hatred towards methodologies about how to be productive in application development.
To me, the wild wild web is still here. I still get my kicks from coding without set in stone documentation and I still hate schedules.
I've always had the view that every project was a wild animal. Worse yet, it's a wild animal in sheep's clothing. And you approach the sheep with a shepherd's hook. When the veil is lifted and you see man eating marsupial with alligator teeth and a scorpion's tail, you have no choice but to throw the shepherd's hook at them and give it all you've got.
And this is how I approach managing a development project. You remember prior projects and throw together a bag of tools that have worked before and then you set to taming the beast. If you tell yourself "Waterfall works every time" then you're just going to find yourself with a shepherd's hook facing a lion or a bear.
Instead, you learn to adapt to every situation and that's the important thing. The rules are few and loose. The customer has the power to destroy everything and you have to deal with it. The best development is done on the fly with just enough documentation to convey the big idea of what's going on and keep everyone on that page. Given real life schedules and timed deadlines, there is such a thing as too much documentation.
Agile development is better in that it allows you more play and doesn't inhibit spur of the moment innovation. I think some of my most demoralizing moments have been when I realized some great new possibility for a project only to have my manager tell me that so much documentation would have to change that "maybe we'll put that in next year's scope." I find this to be ridiculous.
What was happening was people were starting to assume that waterfall was the silver bullet for project management. "What kind of project is it?" "I don't care, we're using the waterfall." And the big problem is that the waterfall is only considered 'adaptable' if you're ok with reworking everything from step one. Is this really necessary for every project though?
Another new thing we have these days is a "framework" that fits a specific type of problem well. You can throw these together on the fly and have very little documentation because the framework provides a well known implementation strategy (see Spring's MVC).
It is my opinion that using an incremental deliverable approach with frequent customer meetings and executive power at any point in the project is the most successful strategy. The "rules" you have to adhere to are up to you and should be purely a case by case basis.
Why do we constantly look for the "next big thing" when the "big thing" is simply experience?
My work here is dung.
I doubt it. Smart dev teams have been using iterative development cycles and keeping their code tidy since a long time before anyone coined the buzzphrase "agile" (or using SillyCapitalLetters and calling things "extreme", or any of the other hype we've put up with lately).
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
"creating prioritized vertical slices that iterate on the most critical elements and features"
Can someone tell me what this means?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Working at a major game company, here's what happened when someone here raised XP:
The guy who suggested it, "It's an itterative development model. We identify core features, develop those features, refine those features with the customer, then add the next layer, repeating as we go. We gain much better code as every component meets the customer's need as it is developed, challenging the customer to think about it in context, and allowing us to add additional itterations if needed."
Management, "So, we can identify additional features throughout development?"
"Absolutely. You just have to assign additional resources (time/people) to account for those extra features. But, by identifying them as they come up, you end up with a much better system that really does everything right."
Over the next few months, features kept getting added, developers dutifully updated schedules. All was happy. Followed by...
Management, "This was supposed to ship before thanksgiving. It's now slated to ship in the new year. We'll entirely miss the holiday season."
Rapidly realizing his mistake for suggesting it guy, "Yes. But you kept coming up with new features. And they are great new features. Think how much better the product is for it."
"If we miss the holiday season market, we lose money. This has to ship 'on time'."
"But on time is a function of how much you add. We're developing everything to schedule. You've just increased the features so increased the schedule."
"The schedule can't move."
"So you'll have to lose some of the remaining itteration milestones. You'll have to drop features."
"But we like all the features we've come up with."
"But adding features adds time. You've known that since the beginning."
"We've known this has to ship for the holiday season and you promised us we could have extra features. You're just going to have to work more overtime. Fortunately you're overtime exempt so that won't cost us anything to get this project back on schedule."
"It is on schedule. You just changed the schedule by adding features that were identified along the way."
"You told us your wonderful "XP" model would let us do that. We gave you the chance to try this new method under the understanding we got these benefits."
"And you do."
"Good. Then make your schedule."
"We are mak-"
"No arguments. This discussion is over. You promised you could deliver the extra features. You're now behind schedule for the holiday season. You're just going to have to crunch. End of discussion."
Yeah, thanks XP.
Never, ever, raise exciting new methodologies to management. They will hear all of the advantages and expect every last one of them as though it was the perfect implementation of the method whilst completely failing to hear (and certainly refusing to act on or implement if they do hear) any of the trade-offs that have to be made to enable those gains.
Tragically, I couldn't RTFA because of th excessive market speak.
In order to energize the evolution of computer games we need to synergize on the vertical slies... WTF?
I guess people forgot to mention that writing computer games rates up there with writing operating systems in complexity...
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
This is just an issue with management, though. A good manager will trust his engineers (or fire them and replace them with trustworthy alternatives). The manager's job is to set the direction of the project, get the engineers what they need to steer in that direction, and then get out of the way as much as possible and as quickly as possible.
It's staggering how many managers don't realise this, and hamstring their dev teams with their personal, half-baked, technically-incompetent ideas and/or with excessive procedures and beaucratic reporting because the manager "has to know what's going on". Of course he does, up to a point, but what exactly is he going to do if a developer does tell him that a bug fix was delayed by a day because {$TECHNOBABBLE}? If he's not going to act on some information, he doesn't need to know it, and requiring developers to take time out of their day to "keep the manager in the loop" more than necessary just disrupts development.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I have been developing products for a long time (decades if you must know). For what it's worth, it is my experience that the people on the team have by far the biggest impact on product quality, timeliness, and all those other goodness measures. I believe that the methodology is almost immaterial. Good engineers will instinctively use the appropriate process for the problem at hand. Now, this doesn't necessarily scale to very large projects, which is why I am a firm believer in loose coupling. As soon as practical, decompose the big project in to a collection of loosely coupled smaller projects and then put in place the teams (unfettered by process dogma) to develop the pieces. Ahh, you ask, but what process do you use to decompose the system? See my earlier comment - choose a small team of very good engineers and have them do it. Don't tell them how -- they already know that. Trust people, not process. Ironically there is one process that I believe is critical to every organization's success, and it probably the least-studied, least-optimized, least-formalized process every company has ... and that process is the interview process. Clearly if I am going to trust my people to do the right things and make the right choices, I had better hire the right people. Anyhow, that's about $0.93 more than my $0.02 so I'll step down off my soapbox now.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
The problem using any software development methodology which requires user feedback for new product development is that you don't actually have any users - best you can get is a marketoid and those change their minds every 5 minutes.
./ for the last couple of years, the main process problem with game development seems to be that a lot of the control over the final product lies with Marketing, and worse, Marketing is in a different company altogether (the producer) than game development - so even with good managers on the software development side (already unlikelly) it's difficult to control the the flow of wacky ideas "that just have to be included in the game" coming from the marketoids - thus requirements creep is rife, which almost guarantees that long hours and death marches are standard.
You see, the closest you have for a user of a new game is a gamer and those can't really help you refine your requirements 'cause all they want from a game is to be entertained and they don't really know beforehand how a new, entertaining, game will look like - "having fun" is hardly an easy to define business process.
Maybe some sort of mixed approach where you have a game designer with an overall view of the game concept and a generic pool of gamers to check out the "fun factor" during game development. Might work well for games with an "exploration" component (for example RPGs) for which you can design the early levels, "test" them with some gamers and then use the result to fine tune those levels and later ones. Still, i doubt it can be usefull in game genres such as RTS and Sims.
More in general, and judging from the posts i've been seing in