Game Development In a Post-Agile World 149
An anonymous reader writes "Many games developers have been pursuing agile development, and we are now beginning to witness the debris and chaos it has caused. While there have been some successes, there have also been many casualties. As the industry at large is moving away from the phantasmagoria of Agile, Gwaredd Mountain, Technical Director at Climax Studios, looks at Post-Agile and what this might mean for the games industry."
Conclusions (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Conclusions (Score:5, Interesting)
My company started as a dinky little post-dotcom-startup, doing certain agile practices (extreme programming with a little bit of scrum), and it's since been bought out and now sells quality software to big enterprise customers tens of thousands to millions of dollars. As with any development methodology, it's got its ups and its downs, and depending on how you're trying to actually operate as a business, you'll need to make adaptations; moreover, it helps a lot if you actually employ intelligent people who know what they're doing.
Yes, maybe the Agile hype is a bit much, but so is the anti-Agile-hype hype. It's actually a good idea to start with simple things that work and are easy to code (so you can start making money today) instead of waiting forever building the Perfect System. The key is to manage the transition to more complicated things in an effective manner (so you can keep making money tomorrow). You start by thinking in the back of your mind about how you can make things easier to transition to the Perfect System in the future. That's probably the main tricky part.
Re:Conclusions (Score:4, Insightful)
That should be pretty much method-independent.
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That should be pretty much method-independent
More intelligent and skilled people would always help, but I'm quite sure I'd run a project differently if I had an elite team vs a few skilled and many mediocre developers. The greater imbalance in the team, the less you can rely on "the team" working it out and the more you have to introduce structure like XP or test-driven development or waterfallish specs and designs made by the skilled people.
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The problem is that in a lot of 2 bit organisations, unskilled Development Managers come along and cobble together a frankenstein process, and/or don't enforce it during the execution. What was once an Agile PROCESS, now becomes an AD-HOC MESS.
When
Re:Conclusions (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, no: a completely toxic process-driven scheme will drive away creative and intelligent engineers. So will a completely batty and air-headed and uncontrolled 'agile' scheme. Balance and common sense is vital.
Rgds
Damon
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Agreed, or at least it may be informal.
The most successful teams I've worked in have all been populated with individuals independently mentally committed to DoingTheRightThing(TM), and formal rules beyond versioned delivery of the end products were rarely needed.
Rgds
Damon
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Someone needs to contact this guy and tell him that his emails are being posted on /.
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Your meta-swerve is cunning but not cunning enough to fool me oh molecule gating menace! B^>
Rgds
Damon
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That should be pretty much method-independent.
It's not. Companies who have everything determined in rigid processes can get more useful out out of idiots than companies that still need to invent lots of things. Companies that have lots of stuff to figure out have a bigger need of smart people instead, and those are also more attractive to smart people, because they get the freedom to use their smarts.
Some companies prefer cheap programmers over expensive ones.
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But if you hire such people, you have to pay them. If you fire and replace them with the cheapest ones you can find, you can get a big fat bonus, cash in your options, and then blame any lack of quality on incompetent employees.
I should had been a CEO :).
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Not necessarily,
I have been working with Agile software development for 3 years now. Delivering working software every 2 or 3 weeks and never had a single day of delay or extra cost. Got extremely satisfied clients.
Now, it is not a religion, it is not the only and best way to view software development. It is just one tool every project manager must have in his toolbox.
Always think, does this software that I am building looks more like a building a bridge or like writing a book?
If you are building a bridge
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I have no mod points, but I would like to comment here so I can bookmark this comment for later. That's a very nice simile that I am going to steal!
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A question that will be answered if you ... read the article. Strangely enough the article sets out fairly clearly what the article sets out.
Madness, I know.
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You almost had me going there... then I realized what you were really up to. Nobody reads the articles. Ever. You sir deserve to take home some gold at the Trollympics.
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TFA starts out sounding like idiot drivel with strong anti-agile prejudices caused by bad experiences with bas, expensive consultants. Later on it gets very informative, however. It's not the Agile doesn't work. It's that, depending on your situation, it might not work for you.
Agile gives programmers freedom. If you've got good programmers, that's a good idea. If your programmers are crap, you're better off restricting their creativity. At least, that's the gist I'm getting from the first half of the articl
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I've used scrum for over a year now, so my opinion is colored by that. It's my opinion that scrum works quite well in terms of productivity but it has two major problems. It takes most the fun out of development and turns IT work into a daily grind of task processing fed from an infinite treadmill. The second is it kills inventiveness.
Why do I say that? Well, scrum prioritizes tasks by importance and not by tasks you're interested in working on. On teams I was on the task priority was simplistic and based o
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At my current company we allow for "just because" time. This can be up to 10% of a developer's time, but even that number is flexible. At the end of someone's "just because" time, the business provides constructive (read constructive) feedback as to whether that time was useful, and why/why not.
We combat burnout, and we allow for each developer to get some gun slinging time, which is very important for creativity. At the end, they get feedback as to whether it was useful
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Another conclusion might be: Sometimes it's the right tool, sometimes it's the wrong tool. Failing to get a nail in using a screwdriver doesn't mean you're a fool (OK, you are a fool for choosing the screwdriver, but let's say you are ordered to use it), it means that a screwdriver just isn't good for putting nails in. Yet it can do miracles for screws.
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Failing to get a nail in using a screwdriver doesn't mean you're a fool (OK, you are a fool for choosing the screwdriver, but let's say you are ordered to use it),
It means somebody somewhere is a fool.
When he knows what he's doing, it's often better to let the guy doing the job choose the appropriate tool.
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Not sure how Agile helps game development (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
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I agree. While I've never actually done (professional) game development, it seems like the waterfall model would make more sense for a game.
Re:Not sure how Agile helps game development (Score:4, Interesting)
Nope. Waterfall is literally impossible on any real game project.
They are waayyy too huge.
What you would want, is the spiral model. Not exactly as in the book, but with the basic ideas. ;)
At least it does good here. Jesse Schell also recommends it, for obvious reasons. And according to him, it’s what is used for all projects that big, that actually finish.
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The "customers" in this case are the designers (and possibly the testers).
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it seems like the waterfall model would make more sense for a game.
Come on people, stop quoting waterfall as a valid model for software development. Even in it's original introduction it was used as an example of a *flawed* model! [wikipedia.org]
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That's because claiming the waterfall is flawed is easier than backing up the model the author is trying to sell.
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That's because claiming the waterfall is flawed is easier than backing up the model the author is trying to sell.
I hear you shouldn't chase them either.
Re:Not sure how Agile helps game development (Score:4, Interesting)
It's easy to lose track of the fact that good software is written by good teams.
I've worked on a couple of game teams that used scrum, and I'm kind of with you in that I don't think it made a whole lot of sense. However, nobody on our teams believed scrum precluded longer-term waterfall-style planning -- so we did that too, we just used scrum for the week-to-week divvying up the work. My impression is that a functional, experienced team can make something workable out of pretty much any process, we certainly did.
Those were traditional fire-and-forget commercial titles, though. Scrum makes a lot more sense for a long-life-cycle online game where you're adding features on a regular basis for 5 years post-launch. This is actually very similar to the context where (I understand) scrum is usually employed: internal information systems that see regular revisions for years after they're put in service.
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That's how we use it.
We have milestones up until release. Each milestone has some requirement of where the game will be at.
We have half a dozen two-week "sprints" each milestone. Each sprint tends to include related work, but it's mainly just a handy way to divide up the time.
Each sprint has big tasks ("stories" in the speak) in it (estimated in days), divided up between sprints at the start of each milestone and reorganised at each sprint if needed and agreed to.
Each "story" is broken up into individual ta
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It really depends on the game and the end goal in mind, and how you want to achieve getting there.
I've just started this past week with my room mate the idea of a web based RPG. Think Dungeons and dragons with a Pokemon style interface. Anyways, for something like that, there are a lot of aspects to it, basically everything world of warcraft would have, minus the engine.
So what I have in mind is a mostly agile development. It will initially be released as a stand alone combat system, you have your character
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Look. Anybody with a brain knows that many agile practices don't apply to certain kinds of projects. That's just common sense. I've been in this business long enough to have seen a parade of silver bullet methodologies go by. All of them worked for people who had the development experience, business awareness, and common sense to know when to bend the rules or ignore them. Likewise none of them would take a person incapable of delivering a project and fix that.
"Agile" is a marketing term, and like most
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Anybody with a brain knows that many agile practices don't apply to certain kinds of projects.
But isn't it management that comes up with the development methods? I forsee issues here.
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Iterative style development? Maybe that might work for an MMO where the customers don't mind being permanent beta testers.
MMOs are definitely a strong case for Agile. MMO worlds and features are always evolving. You can't waterfall a feature for a year, toss it out the door, and then ignore it when it's a flop with the users.
Using an agile methodology doesn't mean your end-users are beta testers either. The point isn't to implement broken features and test+fix them later, it's to add and improve working features in a timely fashion. If a feature isn't ready for the deadline, you drop that feature and go ahead with your dea
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... yet I still see fewer bugs in V1.0 of a console game than I do in V1.0 of released "professional" software. Ironically, the main factor worsening this is the industry's widespread adoption of "internet patches", a hack used for a decade by your professional software developers to cover up the known & accepted fact that no software is perfect. For 10 years before that, our software was bug-free from day one, with a *very* few notable exceptions.
All this tells me is that these companies understand the nature of their respective mediums. If you're releasing to a console with no possibility of updates it *is* important that you be meticulous and catch any bugs. If you're releasing to a webserver, then you've got more flexibility. Either way though, I will agree that I've seen a lack of discipline in ensuring code correctness, both at places I've worked and in commercial products where the results are apparent. I think the damage of releasing som
"Agile" was just a PHB buzzword. (Score:5, Funny)
[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. ...you little fucker?”
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,
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”.
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(Maybe he heard it at the squash course?)
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Well, clearly I have no fuckin’ idea about half the English terms. ;))
That’s what you get, for learning English via Slashdot and US TV shows. (Seriously!)
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When to use "agile" methods. (Score:5, Insightful)
"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.
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"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."
In my experience as a game developer (now 10 years ago), the situation wo
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This agrees with my (more recent) experience, but the fact is unless you have your own supply of cash to burn, your money source is going to want milestone deliveries, and probably will not tolerate
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One of key principles of agile is that you always have deliverable software, which plays right into needing to deliver working software at certain milestones.
A well run agile project will be delivering software every couple of weeks though, which also means that every couple of weeks you can hand something to the money men, and to play testers. They can then actually play the game, and pick up any major flaws much earlier in the process, making it feasible to actually do something about it.
I don't know if t
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Unfortunately the "always have something deliverable" part is actually one of the least useful parts of Scrum for game development, in my experience.
The concept is too vague. Any larger game has a quality bar for shipping -- there's no point if it's not at least so good. So saying "deliverable" actually ends up confusing the team; "not completely broken" is what you want to communicate, but the programmers should already be keeping the game runnable. If they weren't doing that, the designers and artists wou
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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.
Yes, you are right.
When a sector becomes mature, a process can be defined.
But this is because making a movie is very expensive, and much more than creating a video game.
On the very few games costing more than 10 millions, there is a lot of procedures.
"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.
Hum, as an ex-game programmer and a current agile developer, I have to say that you are wrong.
Writing a game now requires using lots of frameworks (3D engine, controller input, and in some cases AI).
Using frameworks has nothing to do with agile programming. Not
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Pair programming is the typical example that won't work in game programming.
Why ? Simply because you cannot afford to write every line of code by two programmers when you write a game.
Not every line of code, but for some lines it can make a lot of sense to write them in pairs.
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Since you're going all general on us... A company I worked for used to tell its customers it was an "Agile" company. It announced "Agility Alliance" partners intended to speed time to market, and develop solutions quickly.
Internally, a new development process was rolled out that everyone had to follow. It was classic Waterfall with everything renamed. Then they addressed the shortcomings of Waterfall by adding additional planning, documentation, gate reviews, and I forgot what else.
We're agile, and we ju
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Ding ding. If you are using a existing framework, then getting 'experienced' folks (intelligent is subjective and misleading) will have the domain knowledge, hence design is a lower priority from requirements/user stories. And then an Agile process used as a guideline will work out fine as along as management does the due-diligence in planning and getting clear test/success cases from the dev teams.
Of course all that can ea
Any process is better then no process (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Many games developers ? (Score:1)
Many games developers have been pursuing agile development
Who ?
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That will tell you if they've decided that saying they are using Agile development is good PR/investor relations (does it resonate as a "good practice" on Wall Street that people will be more likely to buy our stock if we say we are using), but won't tell you whether or not they are actually pursuing the methodology.
I mean, everyone here has probably encountered shops that have completely broken processes that don't reflect any formal methodology or even any kind of unique but inte
Agile is dead? (Score:1)
But Agile is a broad term, encompassing many different ideas. Do you mean specifically XP? Scrum? Agile design? I would say elements of all of these things continue to thrive, while in my experience non
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This is exactly how it works.
Too long (Score:2)
Did TFA have "Mary had a little lamb" in the middle of it? Nobody knows, and nobody ever will. Bonus points for unfalsifiable assertions in the first paragraph.
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TL;DR
Also -- PowerPoint graphics ftl.
Staring blankly (Score:2, Funny)
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Well, agile programming has done harm to the games industry, and therefore they are now looking for phlegmatic programmers.
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Personally, I think it's all just a bunch of crap. Any carpenter will tell you that you should assemble the walls before you put the roof on. Any programmer will tell you that you need a filesystem driver before you need a resource managem
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I find it funny that many put down cowboy coding as an atrocity--worst of the worst sins, but how come many revenue positive startups are built on top of cowboy code? It's because it works if the developers are good and passionate, but if not the code churned out will be a mess of spaghetti. Corporate profitability is priority #1--not code quality. Code quality is probably #3 or #4 on the list.
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The only time that quality is ever sacrificed is when fixing bugs close to a milestone. But as soon as the milestone is over, we generally get a chance to rip out our hacks and do it properly.
Honestly, I think our
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You know, it's about leveraging the curation of your social graph in the hyperpersonal news-stream of the post-2.0 web. I think.
Oh ... I did not know ... (Score:4, Insightful)
that ...
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
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The problem is that "Agile" as a methodology means almost nothing. We value people over processes, etc, etc. It could be anything.
I've worked on a couple of very successful XP style projects. One was so successful that it surpassed my wildest expectations. We had good people on the project, but it wasn't much different than other teams I've worked on before. The biggest difference was an interest in the XP practices and a consistent approach to applying them. The more we did it, the more we learned, a
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Every single thing that is stated as best practice in TDD, XP or Scrum is a very good thing
Is overcomplicating and mangling your code to conform to the limitations of your testing framework a very good thing?
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I assume you're referring to TDD? TDD can be done in many ways, and only the most extreme and (as you said) cumbersome involve testing frameworks or unit testing.
I've found unit testing to be good for critical and complex back end components that are difficult to test from the front end. But to me, TDD can be as simple as "test each function as you write it to make sure it actually works". You can do it with print statements if you want, whatever works. As long as you don't get to 500,000 lines of code
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I assume you're referring to TDD? TDD can be done in many ways, and only the most extreme and (as you said) cumbersome involve testing frameworks or unit testing.
Well, I agree that it's not all there is to TDD, and that was kinda tongue in cheek. I disagree with your assessment of it as "extreme", however. It seems to me that the majority of TDD community are strong proponents of this approach.
Actually, I don't mind either unit testing or mocking frameworks, the problem is that most existing ones are deficient in that you have to specifically tailor your classes (that is, your API) so that they can be mocked. Examples include no static, no final/sealed, and in C#, v
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If your standups ever run longer than 15 minutes, you're not doing scrum standups, you're doing status meetings or reporting or some such. That is not scrum.
methodology for noobs (Score:2)
Problem is managers and CEOs lap up the Agile mantra especially when from a slick salesman. Agile sounds sexy. Waterfall methodology is what stale dinosaurs use.
Re:methodology for noobs (Score:4, Informative)
I question whether you really get Agile, either. Yes, the requirements for the entire project are not given up-front. But the requirements for each sprint are.
Working without requirements is crazy and is guaranteed to destroy your sanity. Without requirements, you cannot estimate anything and you never know when you are done.
Yes, requirements can change in Agile, but never in the middle of a sprint. If the boss wants to send it back because it's the wrong shade of blue (despite that being the shade they picked) they will know exactly what it will cost them to change the color, and they'll get to decide exactly what sprint you'll do it in.
Agile without user feedback!??? (Score:4, Interesting)
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:
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:
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!"
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Then that werewolf is going to chew your ass up...
process is something to tread carefully with (Score:2)
Things take longer -> enthusiasm drops away -> it becomes just a job -> people lose interest in talking and reading about the technology -> their learning slows or even stops.
I believe process and structures should be applied very very carefully, and more often than not, sparingly. I believe chaos, common sense and "yeh that works for us" can combine to com
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IME, places that reject formal processes citing that kind of reason tend have worse results than the worst of the "slavish adherence to inappropriate process" places. Any process should be flexibly applied (generally; there are probably some areas where there are good re
Was it ever Agile? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Everyone who is annoyed at this article seems to be claiming that the author hasn't experienced agile as it should be practiced.
I have some experience with another methodology, cleanroom software development. The idea behind is, you make a detailed specification, you implement all the code with copious annotations, explaining each line of code. Then you have a big code review, in which each line of code is viewed and the engineers all agree that it correctly implements exactly the specification of the line
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Right methodology for right use.
Standard Waterfall for a clearly set goal with specific purpose and function, unlikely to evolve, well known and specified.
Agile if you don't really know where you're going, trying various approaches to see which works, soft metrics like "it should be fun".
Cleanroom for short code for known and unchangeable specification, where bugs are not acceptable.
Waterfall is good for business apps. Cleanroom is great for embedded and mission-critical. Agile feels just like the right thi
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I can't imagine any large scale game being designed by the programmers. That's what designers and producers do; programmers and artists then take the design and make it work on screen as close to the design as possible.
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"Waterfall" is a myth [sqablogs.com]. As this article shows, the actual methodology that created the myth was explicitly cyclic, taking a batch of requirements, specifying them, implementing them, testing them and repeating. "Waterfall" has only ever been a straw man to be attacked by agile proponents. It's easy to make people who have no methodology at all feel like they must have been doing waterfall all along, when they weren't.
Agile might "feel" better for games, but when you have to produce a product that gets presse
Orientated. (Score:3, Interesting)
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...
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I stopped RTFB'ing when I read the word "orientated."
A friend of mine from Indiana spent a year in Japan. During the first 3 months, he felt very out of place. Then he got orientated.
Excellent article against Agile (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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people don't throw bugs over the fence to the only dev that is working with that bit (who happens to be on vacation for three weeks)
Yes, this is the biggest threat with code ownership--having to rely on that "one guy" to fix something means you're fucked if that person gets fired or hit by a bus.
The answer to this is what I like to call the sensei-model. One dev is a code owner, and another dev is their shadow. It's the code owner's responsibility to ensure their shadow knows the code as well as they do.
voted for Obama, then voted for Brown. (Score:2)
Great, another swing voter
Post-agile world? What? (Score:2)
Every year at GDC they have more and more Agile workshops. Seems like every studio I know is using scrum. I don't see any indication that agile is going away at all. Certainly there are agile projects that have failed, as have waterfall projects. But it really sounds like the author had some bad experiences with bad project management, and decided to blame the entire Agile methodology for it.
From what I've seen, game projects involve milestone deliverables based on the publisher requirements and events
Agile clearly means something else than I thought (Score:2)
How cool is that: a whole article of which I didn't understand one word because I thought it was about making games for people who are not so agile anymore as they used to be, so they need games that rely on wit and intelligence rather than fast reactions.
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We use these terms because it's very long winded to spell out what we mean in much the same way that we say wi-fi when talking about a wireless system for transmitting data between general purpose computing devices.
Re:I am a game developer. (Score:5, Insightful)
Do people in management at large corporations actually talk like this?
No, the programmers do.
Agile is all about breaking the project down into small, more-or-less self-contained (sets of) features, and getting the users involved in the process. The aim is the same, to go from a set of requirements to a finished product, but it's supposed to be more flexible, more able to cope with changes along the way, etc (hence, "agile").
It differs from the traditional waterfall method in that it allows for coding of one (set of) requirement(s) to start, while the next set is being specced out; it also allows (in fact, requires) that testing of the last set of delivered functionality is performed while the current set is being developed. Thus it runs several separate workstreams in parallel. If that testing reveals any bugs that need to be fixed now, then the fixes can be worked into the next sprint as required (which yes, may well push features out, either to a later date or completely out of the project).
Agile suits some projects better than others, some customers better than others, and some project teams better than others. When it works well, it can work really well; similarly when it's poorly managed or people have unrealistic expectations, it can crash and burn like any other method. (And similarly, of course, other methods of running software projects can work very well too - use the right tool for the right job...)
Re:I am a game developer. (Score:4, Funny)
Well, I usually test before I implement. Far fewer failures that way. Just a single "file not found."
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Lose the zeroes, hire some heroes.
I think the kind of people you hire (or want to hire) has a big impact on what kind of development methodology works for you. And vice versa. TFA mentions as one of the advantages of more process-oriented (less agile) methodologies that you can hire cheaper programmers. Compare McDonalds to a quality restaurant: McDonalds cooks by process rather than people, and it works very well for them. But no real chef will want to work in their kitchen.
If you want to hire heroes, you need to treat them as such, and t
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Software development is still a craft.. more than art, but way less than engineering..
until we have tools to make software in a consistent, reproductible way, we can't apply engineering tecniques to software development
We've had tools for that since forever. `cp` for example. Reproducing software reliably is trivial in comparison to bridges, because software is only information, and not something physical. Writing software is not like building consistent and reproducible bridges, it's like inventing a new kind of bridge. There's always going to be some art, judgement and testing involved.