An Agile Retrospective
Clinton Keith
Overview
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Retrospective format
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What works (clear wins)?
What doesn’t work so well?
What do we need to start doing?
Info gathered from developers
Talent and leadership still # 1
Things That Work
Iteration
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Making things “potentially done” on a frequent
and regular basis
Inspect and adapt
The “heartbeat” of an agile process
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Discover/prove what is fun
Expose risk
Refine your plans
Better communications with your customer
Reduced cost of fix now vs. fix later
Time-boxing
A time-box is a fixed length of
time given to produce results.
The results are variable.
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Iterations are a timebox, but content can be timeboxed within an iteration as well.
Quality is a variable that the customer should judge
based on cost
Especially good in production, but need to adjust
timebox for quality & improvements
"Perfect is the enemy of good enough"
Agile and Leadership
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The role of leadership
in an agile culture shift
to a mentoring/support
role from a command
and control role
Creating ownership
Unity of vision on large
teams
Leads from the front
Prioritized Planning
Sprint
High
Release
Value
Priority
Future
Releases
Cost
Risk
Knowledge
Low
Lower priority features might get dropped
Retrospectives
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Valuable at every level
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Team
Project
Company
Tools That Help Planning
Mind Maps
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Tool for hierarchical
knowledge analysis and
breakdown
Great for large team
planning
Can export to any format
We use MindManager
from MindJet
Value Stream Maps
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Map out work flow
Focus on waste reduction
Great for asset production
Translate directly to enhanced Scrum (Kanban) taskboards
Show the value of collaboration
Reduced level production costs by 56% using this
Script
Concept treatments
for environments
Env Set
Definition
Low Rez level
Concept Pass
Env Set
Creation
Paths/Gameplay
Design Tuning
Lighting Polish
Extreme Programming
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TDD
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What is TDD?
Benefits
Automated testing
Continuous integration
Bourne Conspiracy hit Alpha
with very few technical risks
Pair Programming?
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What is pair programming
Benefits
Challenges
What Hasn't Worked So Well
Adoption issues
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Scrum is hard
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Changing practices from the start
can backfire
Apprentice
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Journeyman
Silver bullet mentality
XP is controversial
External pressures
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Management
Publisher
Master
Agile for Artists and Designers
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The shortcomings of
Scrum
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Real flow is more
complex
Specialists vs.
generalists
There are no XP-like
practices for artists and
designers
Lean and Kanban may be
the answer
Large teams
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Division by discipline doesn’t work as
well as cross-disciplined teams
A large team can lack a sense of
ownership across many teams
Creating local areas of ownership can
lead to fractured vision
Long Term Agile Planning
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Not an exact fit for video game
development
Creates fear with external
customers
Has created a preproduction/production divide
on planning
Agile vs. Waterfall
Agile Planning
Ideal Waterfall
100%
90%
80%
70%
Debug/Optimize
60%
Tune
50%
Asset Creation
Code
40%
Planning
30%
20%
10%
0%
Design
Preproduction
Production
Alpha
Beta
Agile Planning
Actual Waterfall
100%
90%
80%
70%
Debug/Optimize
60%
Tune
50%
Asset Creation
Code
40%
Planning
30%
20%
10%
0%
Design
Preproduction
Production
Alpha
Beta
Agile Planning
Ideal Agile
100%
90%
80%
70%
Debug/Optimize
60%
Tune
50%
Asset Creation
40%
Code
Planning
30%
20%
10%
0%
Release Release Release Release Release Release Release Release Release Release
#1
#2
#3
#4
#5
#6
#7
#8
#9
#10
Agile Planning
Game Dev Agile
100%
90%
80%
70%
Debug/Optimize
60%
Tune
50%
Asset Creation
40%
Code
30%
Planning
20%
10%
et
a
Al
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a/
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#4
#3
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od
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Pr
od
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#2
#1
Pr
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#3
Pr
od
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#2
Pr
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du
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#1
0%
Agile and Publishers
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3rd party change is harder
Switching from planned to iterative
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Ease them into it
Plans can co-exist with iteration
Product owner education
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A bad product owner can kill a project
Leveraging the value of agile teams
What we need to start doing
(new/more/better)
Improve transition
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Agile Transition Strategies
Coaching & Certification
Agile Transition Strategies
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Bottom Up or Top Down?
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Beachhead team
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Entire company
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Low cost & risk
Takes more time
How to spread?
Creates influence
Easier to adopt and try all practices
Requires more coaching
Takes less time
More cost & risk
Usually requires command and control
Inspecting and adapting harder
An agile transition requires leadership
Coaching & Certification
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Reading a book is
not enough
The value is not the
“certificate”, but the
standard of
instruction.
Lean
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Derived from TPS
Focuses on waste
More suitable for asset
production than Scrum
but compatible.
By looking at the whole
stream and standards
that are continually
improved by everyone, it
encourages a culture of
continual improvement.
Conclusion
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www.AgileGameDevelopment.com
www.MountainGoatSoftware.com
Questions?