In its infancy, Large Animal was driven primarily by the talents and direction of a few key individuals. This arrangement worked while the company was still small and the number of projects was limited. As Large Animal grew, however, its ability to take on additional projects and still deliver at the same level of quality was constrained by the time availability of those key individuals.

Through the adoption of Scrum, the focus on quality that was previously dependent on a few individuals has been redistributed to the project teams. With some of the principle tenets of agile development coming into play, the team is incentivized to continuously produce working software that is focused on the highest priority user stories/features.

Large Animal has found that teams that are practicing agile need less guidance from senior designers and developers, thus allowing those people to direct a larger number of teams. As a result, Large Animal has been able to almost double the number of active project teams. More significantly, they have opened a new offsite development location in Atlanta, Georgia, a move that the founders would not have previously been comfortable with.

The level of interaction between senior designers (or senior artists or senior programmers) at Large Animal and project teams is partly driven by the skilled experience the designers possess, and it is partly a matter of trust. When the team is properly focused on the quality of user experience in a game and can deliver demonstrable builds at regular intervals, the senior designer does not need to be as involved on a day to day basis.

The agile development approach is good at defining a sandbox with certain boundaries within which a team can work. If the team strays off track, the iterative build-review process highlights where course corrections are needed long before the project is threatened.

Trust is also an important factor in the relationships Large Animal has with publishers and other partners. Take the experience on one of the Large Animal agile project teams as an example. On this project the publisher, as part of the product owner team, was involved in sprint reviews on a regular basis. The level of visibility that the publisher had into the progress of the team was extremely high.

This insight into what the project team was doing made negotiations with the publisher about the schedule impact of changes they had requested much easier.

From the publisher's perspective, the transparency of the development process and the progress of the team raised trust in Large Animal and lowered the perceived risk of the project. By reviewing a working build every sprint, the publisher had significantly more opportunities to impact change during the course of development than they had on previous projects.

"We take time to describe the development methodology to publishers even if they don't fully understand agile. I think it's comforting for them to know that we are not haphazardly building games, but that we are following best practices which were developed over many years and which are being used by many other organizations."

Wade also says that he's seen benefits of agile teams when it comes to the milestone contract structure. "The agile principle of continuously delivering working software means that milestone builds are never a surprise to the publisher. By the time we get to a milestone, the publisher has already seen working builds at regular and frequent intervals leading up to that point, and they've been invited to comment at each checkpoint. As a result, there is less pressure on the milestone and the milestone becomes more of a formality."

Project estimation at the start of a project is still challenging, but having a clear framework has made this part of the negotiation much easier. "We've been able to set the expectation that the milestone dates are not fully known or accurate, but with the reassurance that we have a clearly defined sandbox in which to work. The key thing is that we're not just saying, 'it'll be done when it's done'."

Wade also notes that release planning (projecting forward based on historical team velocity) has helped highlight issues early in a project and allows him and the other producers to adjust course before a situation becomes critical.