Game Development In a Post-Agile World

An anonymous reader writes "Many games developers have been pursuing agile development, and we are now beginning to witness the debris and chaos it has caused. While there have been some successes, there have also been many casualties. As the industry at large is moving away from the phantasmagoria of Agile, Gwaredd Mountain, Technical Director at Climax Studios, looks at Post-Agile and what this might mean for the games industry."

Comments

Re:Conclusions

[FooAtWFU]

My company started as a dinky little post-dotcom-startup, doing certain agile practices (extreme programming with a little bit of scrum), and it's since been bought out and now sells quality software to big enterprise customers tens of thousands to millions of dollars. As with any development methodology, it's got its ups and its downs, and depending on how you're trying to actually operate as a business, you'll need to make adaptations; moreover, it helps a lot if you actually employ intelligent people who know what they're doing.

Yes, maybe the Agile hype is a bit much, but so is the anti-Agile-hype hype. It's actually a good idea to start with simple things that work and are easy to code (so you can start making money today) instead of waiting forever building the Perfect System. The key is to manage the transition to more complicated things in an effective manner (so you can keep making money tomorrow). You start by thinking in the back of your mind about how you can make things easier to transition to the Perfect System in the future. That's probably the main tricky part.