An Agile Retrospective

Clinton Keith

Overview

• Retrospective format• 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• Making things “potentially done” on a frequent

and regular basis• Inspect and adapt• The “heartbeat” of an agile process

• 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

• Iterations are a timebox, but content can be time-boxed 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"

A time-box is a fixed length of time given to produce results. The results are variable.

Agile and Leadership• 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

Sprint

Release

Priority

High

Low

Future Releases

Value

Cost

Risk

Knowledge

Prioritized Planning

Lower priority features might get dropped

Retrospectives• Valuable at every level

• Team• Project• Company

Tools That Help Planning

Mind Maps

• 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• Map out work flow• Focus on waste reduction• Great for asset production• Translate directly to enhanced Scrum (Kanban) task-

boards• Show the value of collaboration• Reduced level production costs by 56% using this

S c r ip tC o n c e p t t r e a t m e n t s

f o r e n v ir o n m e n t sE n v S et

D ef in it io nL o w R ez lev e l C o n c ep t P as s L ig h tin g P o lis hD es ig n T u n in gP ath s /G am ep lay

E n v S etC r ea tio n

Extreme Programming• TDD

• What is TDD?• Benefits

• Automated testing• Continuous integration• Bourne Conspiracy hit Alpha

with very few technical risks• Pair Programming?

• What is pair programming• Benefits• Challenges

Average Time that Bourne Build is Green(Average of the UE3 PC-Release / Bourne Functional Tester)

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What Hasn't Worked So Well

Adoption issues

• Silver bullet mentality• XP is controversial• External pressures

• Management• Publisher

Apprentice Journeyman Master

• Scrum is hard• Changing practices from the start

can backfire

Agile for Artists and Designers

• The shortcomings of Scrum

• 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

• 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

• Not an exact fit for video game development

• Creates fear with external customers

• Has created a pre-production/production divide on planning

• Agile vs. Waterfall

Agile PlanningIdeal Waterfall

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Agile PlanningGame Dev Agile

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Agile and Publishers

• 3rd party change is harder• Switching from planned to iterative

• Ease them into it• Plans can co-exist with iteration

• Product owner education• 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

• Agile Transition Strategies• Coaching & Certification

Agile Transition Strategies• Bottom Up or Top Down?

• Beachhead team• Low cost & risk• Takes more time• How to spread?• Creates influence• Easier to adopt and try all practices

• Entire company• 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

• Reading a book is not enough

• The value is not the “certificate”, but the standard of instruction.

Lean• 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

• www.AgileGameDevelopment.com• www.MountainGoatSoftware.com

Questions?