This studio's journey into the world of agile software
development has not been completely intuitive. There are a number of questions
and issues that they are still struggling with.
How to
write a good user story. Philosophically, user stories are a perfect way to
connect the day to day effort of the team back to its benefit for the player.
Often, it's very easy to imagine what a player might want to see in the game
(i.e. "I want to see cool particle effects whenever I do something good
with my character.").
In other cases, however, there is work that does not
fit neatly into the user story format. These are things that no user would ever
ask for directly, and are only connected to a user benefit in a very roundabout
way.
Toward the end of a project in
particular, as the team is dealing with lots of highly focused pieces of work,
it can sometimes reduce the clarity of the Scrum board to state all stories in
terms of the over-arching benefit to the user. Teams at Large Animal have found
that as a project enters the final third of its development that many user
stories end up looking more like more like "super tasks" that
encompass a smaller set of sub tasks.
Stories,
tasks, or bugs. Prior to adopting agile, Large Animal was in the habit of
using FogBugz as both a task and bug tracking tool. While this tool lacks the
visibility of Scrum, it is very effective at helping to manage large numbers of
detailed bug reports and reduces the chance that bugs fall through the cracks,
especially on days where a build is undergoing heavy testing and revision
before going out the door.
Unfortunately, there is often considerable overlap
with work that is more loosely specified on the Scrum board and would be dealt
with during the verification process. As a result, there is sometimes confusion
about which tool to use to track an issue.
Time
estimation. There's just no getting around the fact that it's really
difficult to accurately estimate how much time it will take to come up with the
right solution to a problem, whether it be in code, gameplay, or UI design.
While agile methods have done much to make development more comfortable and
predictable at Large Animal, estimating the time needed to complete a task is
an ongoing challenge.
One team uses a four-week calendar board like this to sequence user stories within a sprint.
Closing
As you can see, the teams at Large Animal have taken the
basic principles of Scrum and applied it to their projects in a way that suits
their needs. Whenever necessary, they've filled in the gaps with homegrown
techniques.
Even though they are still wrestling with certain issues, the agile
framework has served to keep these problems visible and gives the team regular
opportunities to discuss solutions.
This is the most important lesson that the
Large Animal team has learned from agile; that they need to keep thinking
creatively about how they work together and continuously try to improve their
process. This mindset is the key to high performing, self-organizing teams.
When I started here I had never heard of this method. The Scrum process is definitely rewarding and a good way to get everyone on the team involved. I also like it because it increases project transparency.
I think the only downside to the way we use the method is that sprint
planning meetings tend to last the entire day. We have been experimenting with spreading planning meetings throughout the week, but it's difficult and a development point.
When reading about Scrum in game companies, I'm always interested if they had ever tried another approach. If they tried to learn other metodology. Because here I see just "we tried to use different tools, but we choose to use this metodology".
Very interesting article as exaple of agile in games. I have something to think about.
At Flagship Studios, we do our sprint preparation meetings throughout the last week of a sprint to prepare for the next sprint. We limit them to a one hour per meeting at the end of the day. We usually have about three or four of these meetings per sprint.
Since we get a lot of the stories thought through during these meetings, our sprint planning meetings last about an hour and a half.
The best thing I've seen is to estimate with a probability function instead of a single value. Ask people to give 50% and 80% confidence values. This will give room for "I'm not sure, if all goes well it could be 1 day, if things don't align it could be 2 weeks". You then take the confidence ranges and use those to put buffers into the schedule. It worked really well the one time I got to use it.
At Flying Lab, we used the Critical Chain methodology for a couple of years. It is primarily used in manufacturing and we found that it could not scale as our team grew to 70+ people with hundreds of tasks in a milestone. I replaced it with a very lightweight version of scrum that worked well for our project.
I transitioned our team to Scrum from a pretty standard "waterfall" approach at Perpetual, the result was very successful. I think the reduction in excessive BUFD alone made the process a win for us, but there were so many other benefits.
Great article, very similar to our end state at Perpetual.
We had a scrum team with 12 people (11 pigs, 1 chicken) just recently, with a mix of artists and developers. We found it useful to split the morning standup scrum for the whole team into two consecutive scrums, with key individuals on both. This kept the scrums short which is important for maintaining focus but still allowed any blocking factors between staff to be resolved.
@Scrum From the Trenches
"Scrum & XP From the Trenches" is a brilliant read, and can be downloaded from the authors website for free.
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As you can see, the teams at Large Animal have taken the
basic principles of Scrum and applied it to their projects in a way that suits
their needs. Whenever necessary, they've filled in the gaps with homegrown
techniques.
I think the only downside to the way we use the method is that sprint planning meetings tend to last the entire day. We have been experimenting with spreading planning meetings throughout the week, but it's difficult and a development point.
Very interesting article as exaple of agile in games. I have something to think about.
Since we get a lot of the stories thought through during these meetings, our sprint planning meetings last about an hour and a half.
The best thing I've seen is to estimate with a probability function instead of a single value. Ask people to give 50% and 80% confidence values. This will give room for "I'm not sure, if all goes well it could be 1 day, if things don't align it could be 2 weeks". You then take the confidence ranges and use those to put buffers into the schedule. It worked really well the one time I got to use it.
At Flying Lab, we used the Critical Chain methodology for a couple of years. It is primarily used in manufacturing and we found that it could not scale as our team grew to 70+ people with hundreds of tasks in a milestone. I replaced it with a very lightweight version of scrum that worked well for our project.
Great article, very similar to our end state at Perpetual.
We had a scrum team with 12 people (11 pigs, 1 chicken) just recently, with a mix of artists and developers. We found it useful to split the morning standup scrum for the whole team into two consecutive scrums, with key individuals on both. This kept the scrums short which is important for maintaining focus but still allowed any blocking factors between staff to be resolved.
@Scrum From the Trenches
"Scrum & XP From the Trenches" is a brilliant read, and can be downloaded from the authors website for free.
http://www.crisp.se/henrik.kniberg/ScrumAndXpFromTheTrenches.pdf
Congratulations! I heartly giving you a congratulation
Wii fit unites fun and fitness in one product. It can tranform how you exercise, how you balance and even how you move. How will it move you? For more information visit at : http://www.blueunplugged.com/p.aspx?p=122588
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