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When I think of game development, I think of milestones. I think of (relatively) set targets. This is more true for console games than PC game, but lately when I think of games I think console first.

Iterative style development? Maybe that might work for an MMO where the customers don't mind being permanent beta testers. The gap in QA between professional and game software development already feels pretty vast, but add to that yet another style that promotes a more aggressive, less strict regimen of development just sounds like a recipe of disaster.

I'm not sure when Agile became the silver bullet buzzword for programming. I have participated in it, attended Ken Schwaber's talks on managing scrums. I can see its positives and negatives, and it's difficult for me to see how game software development could benefit from being agile unless you're coming up with the next big project with a bunch of friends in your 'garage'. Designing your own game engine and concepts from the ground up where nearly every member of your team is a software architect level and the lightweight methods help. Otherwise if you're a code jockey working on a pre-existing engine then project management and deadlines are likely more effective.

And try pairing up agile software development with offshoring. It reminds me of the old "don't do drugs" commercials with the eggs.

*holds up an egg* this is your software development
*cracks egg* this is going agile
*opens egg over stove* this is agile offshoring
*ignores the fact that there is no pan to catch the egg* any questions?

[For fun: Read it, as if Ricky Gervais were saying it.* ;]

You know when your boss caught on to a new buzzsomething, storms into your room, and wants to play thought-experiments with him on what to change? Restructure the whole company? Because, oh god, it’s so great. He just loves it. With glowing eyes..., like a child. And you hate to tell him, that everything he just told you, and everything you have “planned” in the last 3 hours (of “water-cooler talk”, mind you) ...is a steaming pile of bollocks. ;)

“Agile” is such a thing.
You know he loves it. But he’s got no fuckin’ clue what he’s talking about.
“Yeah boss. Mmm-hmm. Great idea. Love it.... Say, you did hear that at the golf court, didn’t you?”

The thing is... everybody... and I mean every real software developer and project manager... knew that it could. not. work.
We were just sitting there, thinking to ourselves: “You have finally found something that’s even more unrealistic than the “plan everything, then GO!” waterfall model, haven’t you, ...you little fucker?”

Did you know that the spiral model... was invented over twenty years ago? Yeah. That’s how long you and I were sitting there, in our stinky cubicles... printing out everything remotely resembling fliers, and... casually placing them near your boss’s room, so he miight pick one up, and you would not have to beat him with that fuckin cluestick in your most beautiful algorithmic fashion, until he looks like a real flame-grilled burger king burger!

(Thankfully, not all of the industry is that bad. Most game development studios, from what I have heard, are actually implementing the spiral model in a very successful way. As am I. But it didn’t help you much when you were working at EA now did it? ;)
___
* Please, if you want to rip me apart for not getting British English right, write me a e-mail in my native language and regional dialect... south-western Luxemburgish. You know, the one with the “fro”, not the “fra”. ;)

"Agile" methodologies are most appropriate when the project consists of a large number of loosely coupled user-oriented features with no major architectural or technical innovations. Like PHP-based web sites. Or, in fact, much programming which involves using an existing "framework". Someone else has already figured out what the different parts of the system need to say to each other and roughly how they will say it. Development is mostly filling in the blanks.

Trying to use "agile" on a hard, tightly-coupled problem with no predefined structural framework, like an optimizing compiler or a database engine, is likely to result in a disaster.

A game can fall into either category. If the game requires new technology, especially something hard, (advanced AI, a new physics engine, a very large seamless world, etc.) a very front-end design-driven approach may be necessary. On the other hand, if most of the game consists of developing content for different areas of the game world, an "agile" methodology could work fine. Second Life is probably the most extreme example of this.

It's interesting to note that movie-making has become very much a waterfall model business. A few decades ago, moviemaking was much more "agile", and most directors came from a theatrical background. For a theatrical director, there's a debugging phase involving actors on a bare stage, and the content may change considerably during development. Big-budget moviemaking today involves going from script to storyboard to previsualization (making a low-end animated version as a planning tool) to production. That's very much a waterfall process.

Game development has lagged terribly behind traditional / non game programming industries in terms of its development practices. And the most recent projects I have worked on were using a Scrum / Agile hybrid. I will admit to not knowing exactly which is which. But the great thing that Agile/Scrum did was to put in place a process where every time someone asked for a feature change, it would be reflected on the development schedule. I have worked on projects where there was at best a vague checklist of what still needed to be done with no info on how long it was expected to take. In my experience, most milestone crunch work is due to people realizing too late that something that should be in the milestone was not going to get done in time.

The problem with any development practice is that if taken too far, it will cause more problems then it solves. You should not have to write a formal task card up, and put it on the board for trivial tasks. And if you break things down too much, you end up losing sight of the bigger picture.

I do not care what process you use to get things done. As long as someone on the project (probably the project lead), is keeping track of the following:

    - Break down the project into smaller tasks: This makes it at least possible to assign responsibility for specific things to specific people.

    - Task / Feature prioritization: When it comes time to make cuts, knowing what things are important is highly useful.

    - Task interdependency: You want to schedule your work load to make sure no one gets stuck waiting for something else, and it helps to have a list of alternate tasks you can move onto when you do get road blocked.

    - Making sure things are done mostly on time: It is never a good thing to only realize that a task is not going to be done on time 2 days before it needs to be done. If something is taking too long, you should know before hand

    - Making sure new features are checked against the schedule: No one wants to have a project become late because someone decided to add new features half way through the project but did not add time to it.

If you can track these things intelligently you can avoid the worst bits of milestone specific crunch. No process will prevent a deathmarch, or magically squeeze out an extra 6 months of effective development time. But it will avoid the nastiest surprises, and help create a realistic prediction of what a given development team can produce in a given time frame.

END COMMUNICATION

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As the industry at large is moving away from the phantasmagoria of Agile ...

I guess calling Agile a silver bullet and/or calling it a hype or anti hype is just a thing of the media. As a Software Developer you are used to at least know the best tool for your job and the best language for your job (albeit some reasons may prevent you from using them). The same should be true for software project management methods.

Keep in mind that perhaps 50% of all software development houses have no method at all but just do it with more or less success. That often is topped by neither having a version control system nor having an issue tracker. Project management is done with Excel Sheets, which are mailed around and edited/annotated by multiple persons.

Calling Agile "failing" is in my eyes a clear sign that you have no clue about it.

Every single thing that is stated as best practice in TDD, XP or Scrum is a very good thing to do in your process, regardless wether you follow any of those methods strict or prefer a more traditional approach.

Most people calling Agile fail either have (as I stated above) no process at all, never tried it, or already do do a lot of the core practices like nightly builds and continuos integration etc.

This said: no one ever claimed that a good running traditional process which is already yielding high quality result would be even better if run Agile. However everyone who has no process, everyone who has quality problems, everyone who has tracking, budget delivery time problems, those have a much easier term in adopting some agile process and a much easier introduction and adoption of tools instead of one who switches to RUP or similar heavy weight processes.

angel'o'sphere

The essential philosophy of Agile is that development should be done in tight cycles were small self-contained features are designed and implemented, followed by user feedback while planning for the next cycle.

This process is intended to cope with a couple of problems from the old waterfall model, such as:

• End users of a system have needs but they don't know them fully and correctly up-front, so a fully defined requirements document is impossible. Tight cycles of feature-development-user-feedback facilitate user discovery of requirements and allow for small adjustments based on user feedback.
• It avoids the "As soon as we give the requirements to the IT guys we stop hearing from them for a year while all they tell us is that 'they're working on it'" problem. The end users of the system being developed become part of the development process in an Agile process - that brings all sorts of benefits like keeping them happy and getting quick feedback on potential problems.
• The planning stage before each cycle helps with prunning of low-value-high-cost features. By having the user-stakeholder choose the priority of the features to implement in each cycle, the important features will not be left behind just because they didn't look important to the developers

All that this has in common is the existence of end-users (which can be other systems, if your system does not have an UI), which have roughly defined needs (typically a business process) which the software being built will address.

Now look at games:

• The real end-users (gamers) need entertainment. They don't have a pre-existent process which the game would automate to achieve that - in fact some of the best entertainement comes from games that do things no games ever done before.
• "Having fun" is an emotional state which depends on many things that are difficult to pin-down and that even change over time and depend on the user's mind-set: a way to make users achive it cannot be discovered as part of small interactive development loops
• There is no typical end user that can act as a representative of the other users. In fact a successfull game aims to entertain as many sorts of users as possible and as cannot be tunned to the wishes of only some users
• Games are often one-pass entertainment: you play it once and then you never play it again. This means that any users trying the game in between the tight development cycles of Agile would quickly become useless as test-subjects (as boredom overwelmed fun)
• The programming part of a game is often the least important bit of it. In fact in most modern games the code just powers the rules engines (for the mechanics of the games) and the graphics engine (that gives shape to the game world and displays the artwork) and is at it's best when it's not noticed.

So games don't usually fit in the (software development context) pattern for using Agile development methodologies wholesale.

At best, some games might have a creative person behind it with a vision which can serve as the user-stakeholder, but even then often the "vision" is vague and can change a lot over time (a "vision" is much less prone to a continuously-improving discovery process than a "business process" - in fact if the person with the "vision" is not methodical, you end up with a process where a cycle is just as likelly to take the software closer to the "vision" as it is to take it further way from it).

To repeat the often heard (but seldom heeded) motto: "There is no silver bullet!"

The problem is not in "Agile" methodology.

The problem is in "Mongolian Clusterfuck" methodology, called "Agile" by managers who think "Mongolian Clusterfuck" isn't catchy enough.

Agile sets short reachable targets, and reiterates and modifies them upon reaching them. The cycle is 2-4 weeks.

Mongolian Clusterfuck is similar, but the cycle is 2-4 hours and the targets that haven't been reached are abandonned half-finished.

Agile has specs that accept modifications when the customer requests them. Mongolian Clusterfuck has specs that change every time your boss stops by.

Agile has daily meetings of what problems to solve and how. Mongolian Clusterfuck is "this is broken, leave whatever you're doing and fix it now."

Agile has one clear set of goals of a golden middle between performance, stability, portability, cost, time and maintainablity. Mongolian Clusterfuck has two. Simultaneously.

Game development is exceptionally prone to Mongolian Clusterfuck methodology. And then people who never knew Agile think it sucks bad.

I stopped RTFB'ing when I read the word "orientated."

His choice of words betray his place in the hifalutin versus technical [askoxford.com] continuum.

Oh crap I said "continuum", I'm turning into one of them droids! I'm meltiiiiiiiiiing...

Good Agile, Bad Agile [blogspot.com] by Steve Yegge at Google is an excellent article on the pros and (mostly) cons of Agile development.

Personally my single biggest problem with Agile is that it specifically de-emphases code ownership (mental ownership, not economic). In my experience as a developer, the only way you get people to go the extra mile on a project (working nights, weekends, whenever and whatever it takes) is when they feel like that code is theirs.

The other big problem I have is that whenever I see someone talking about Agile development it always feels like they're trying to sell me Amway products. It has the same, almost proselytizing tone that a Born-Again preacher takes when they're holding out the money-jar.