program selection system

Over the past five years, agile has been adopted by the video game industry. It all started at one developer in Southern California called “High Moon Studios”. This studio introduced Scrum and later XP to the rest of the game industry over the following years and helped agile methodologies become one of the most commonly used ways of making games.

Clinton Keith, the CTO of High Moon Studios who introduced agile to the studio and industry will tell the story of how video game developers, in less than two decades, have gone from the garage to large studios requiring years of effort by over a hundred developers to make a game. This rapid growth in team size, cost and failure rates have driven this industry to the brink of failure despite its rapid growth. The video game industry is notorious for extended death march projects and creating controversial products that aren’t always what their customers want. Agile has helped address these problems in a big way.

Clinton will describe how the studio adopted agile and how agile practices have been adopted to video game development. Video game teams are highly cross disciplined and the product value they seem is “fun”. How the customers and team “find the fun” and identify and reduce waste is a challenge. Agile video game teams have adopted not only Scrum and XP, but are adopting Lean, Kanban and other practices to find ways to make better games.