I'm happy to meet up!  Send my an email: clint [at] clintonkeith.com

In addition to the CSM4VG course I'm teaching, I have the following sessions:

Beyond Scrum: Agile Project Management for Games
Date/Time: Thursday (March 11, 2010)   9:00am — 10:00am
Location (room): Room 305, South Hall
Session Description
The session is not an introduction to Scrum. It describes how Scrum fits in to an entire game project management framework.

Agile: No Silver Bullet
Speaker: Chris Oltyan (Director of Product Development, ZeeGee Games), Rich Vogel (Co-Studio Director, BioWare), Clinton Keith (Clinton Keith Consulting), Michael Capps (President, Epic Games)
Date/Time: Friday (March 12, 2010)   9:00am — 10:00am
Location (room): Room 303, South Hall

Session Description
The goal of this panel is to discuss the good and the bad of agile development. Let's not sugar coat it, agile development is hard and does not fit all production paradigms. We'll discuss where the dogmatic approach to agile fails and where to apply practices from other areas, such as waterfall and lean. The panel will also answer audience questions directly and help diagnose how and why Agile projects went wrong, and methods teams and companies can use to get their processes back on track.

It should be a great GDC!

Gamasutra just posted the article based on the survey conducted last month.  Thanks to everyone who participated!

Some tough words to soak in.
http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendId=319545476&blogId=472222118

Just read an article about Forever Interactive, which calls itself "a completely virtual agile game development studio" and how they are developing their MMORPG:
http://www.jsonline.com/features/technology/84796037.html


The nearly 50 programmers and artists working for Forever Interactive are not pulling paychecks but instead banking on eventual compensation that will be a percentage of the revenue - a percentage based on their performance - when money comes in, Harmsen says.

It's a "sweat equity" model, and performance includes things such as communication, meeting deadlines, reaching milestones, with accomplishments compounding until the game launches.

I'll be keeping an eye on them over the next year.

From http://blogs.hbr.org/hmu/2008/02/micromanage-at-your-peril.html

Have you ever worked with a micro-manager? This is someone who thinks he or she needs to be involved in everything that happens within the company. These leaders are closing out the talents of others by not divesting themselves from the day-to-day problem-solving activities of the company. Great leaders let go of the day-to-day, problem-solving activities of the company. Rather, they choose to maximize strategic and relationship-building efforts. These contribute to the forward momentum of the company rather than causing a "bottleneck" at the leader's desk. No one person should do it all — and if they are self-aware, most people will realize that they really aren't capable nor knowledgeable enough to do it all.

thanks to Kim Sellentin for the link.

The Agile Game Development Checklists are meant to help drive discussion about the implementation and effectiveness of agile practices (including Scrum, XP, TDD and Kanban) for a team and stakeholders.

This first version contains a checklist for the ScrumMaster role. Revisit how this role adds value to a Scrum Team and how that role can be improved.

My book is now available at Safari Books Online.
The printed version will be out at the end of May.












This is the "rough cut" version that is available while the book is in final production.

Ironing out the little problems can make it so companies can avoid big disasters.





Notable quotes and points:
- "The trick is to stop that behavior (of not showing something until it is absolutely right)"
- "We confused the organizational structure with the communication structure"
- "Managers: you don't need to be the first person to learn something.  Don't get upset.  Get over it."
- "Because the were working on things they loved, they put up with stuff they didn't like."
- "Success hides problems."
- "This isn't good for our souls to do that (mix quality projects)."
- "If you have a good idea and give it to a mediocre group, they'll screw it up.  If you give a mediocre idea to a good group, they'll fix it, or they'll throw it away and come up with something else."
- "The goal of development [department leadership] is not to find good ideas, it's to put together teams of people that function well together.  And that change altered the way we thought about making movies."
- Nice retrospective (five questions) and empirical process!
- "Human organizations are inherently unstable.  They will fall over and you have to work to keep them upright.  But they fall slowly.  Most people don't notice it.  They let their success blind them.    You have to do constant assessments.   You have to look for the hard truths."

Thanks to Kim Sellentin for the link.

This list contains resources for people in - or interested in - the video game industry.  Here you'll find general and specific news resources, career resources, and more

http://www.fantopro.com/blog/2010/02/list-of-resources-for-video-game-professionals.html

A response to another Scrum-bashing article:
http://www.noop.nl/2010/02/in-defense-of-scrum-please-stop-pissing-on-it.html

"I believe no single model or framework is enough when managing complex systems. Anyone who favors one method and pisses on another is just showing off his ignorance of complexity thinking. "

Scrum isn't the goal.  Agility isn't the point.  It's about finding ways for groups of people to make better products while reducing wasted effort.  It's about creating never-ending cycle of improvement.

Brand loyalty or bashing shuts out wider possibilities.  Labels allow higher cognition to be disabled.  The goal is to always explore practices, use common sense, knowledge and observation to decide what works better and what doesn't. 

Free Realms Reaches 8 Million Registrations!

Free Realms was developed using Scrum by SOE.

Over half a dozen SOE developers have become ScrumMasters in one of my past Certified ScrumMaster for video game development courses.

Riot's League Of Legends Sees Over 1 Million Downloads.

Riot uses Scrum for developing and their developers have spoken about the experience.

A product backlog needs to be well thought out.  Are we prioritizing the right features?  Are the features really what our customers want?  Are we missing anything?

The least effective product backlogs come from limited viewpoints or from seemingly endless boring meetings dominated by a few voices.  They result in one-dimensional backlogs whose vision isn't understood or shared by the team.  This impacts the potential of what a game can be.

How can backlog creation be made more collaborative, innovative and effective?  The best way I've found is to introduce gaming to backlog creation. 

In search of solutions, I recently attended an Enthiosys Innovation Games (r) Master Class for Scrum trainers in San Jose run by Luke Hohman.  Innovation Games (r) have been used in a wide range of product design and is the subject of a great book.  For two days, we practiced selecting, running and facilitating each of the game types.  Some of the games I'd used in past training (like "Product Box").  Most were new.  It really opened my eyes to the science and psychology behind such games and the power they hold.

In March, I'm planning to attend the first Certified Product Owner training class designed with Innovation Games(r) with Luke and Mitch Lacey, an excellent Certified Scrum Trainer, in Seattle.  I'm very much looking forward to attending this class.  I highly recommend it for any product owner, especially those working on video games.

I can't imagine a better application of gaming for product planning than for video games!

You've either changed the feed location or the redirect has worked.

This could have been easier!

The new address of this blog is now:
http://blog.agilegamedevelopment.com/

Apologies for any inconvenience.  Blogger is dropping their FTP service, which is what I used in the past.

The new blog address seems to be working!

Blogger is soon going to drop the publishing service I've been using, so I need to change it.  As a result, this blog's feed will become http://blog.agilegamedevelopment.com

Blogger is promising me that this change will be transparent to you and that the old address will redirect your readers to the new address.  

See you there!

I just received my copy of Mass Effect 2, developed by Bioware in Edmonton, Canada, a client of Clinton Keith Consulting.

I met the developers of Dragon Age late in the game's development and was bombarded with a wide range of insightful questions about Scrum and agile in general.

The ME2 team I met was talented, well led and experienced in using agile practices (having adopted agile during ME1).  They explored lean practices for ME2 production and spoke about them at GDC.

Bioware has always been at the forefront of exploring ways to improve their development processes.  Talent, vision, focus and leadership are in abundance there.   They understand that Scrum is merely a tool for leveraging those attributes and that continual improvement is a necessity.

Congratulations to both teams and Bioware!