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Clinton Keith - ovver the course of 20 years, Clinton has gone from programming avionics for advanced fighter jets and underwater robots to overseeing programming for hit video game titles such as Midtown Madness, Midnight Club and The Bourne Conspiracy. He introduced the video game industry to agile development and is now an agile coach teaching teams how to adopt Scrum.
Website: http://www.clintonkeith.com/
An Agile Retrospective
Introduction
The session discusses the challenges of adopting agile beyond Scrum. Topics include adopting Extreme Programming (XP), Agile planning, Lean Methodology for Production and changes to Scrum that have been made to adapt to Game Development.
Concise
This presentation discusses some of the deeper topics of agile game development as experienced from the first company to adopt these practices in the game industry five years ago.
This session is an honest assessment of the benefits and challenges of continuing down the agile road. Many companies that have tried Scrum have not met with success and the presentation will address the common issues that have been seen.
Scrum has grown in popularity in the industry over the past several years, but it is only the first step in adopting an agile culture at a development studio. Since adopting Scrum, High Moon has continued to experiment using agile methods to improve their development processes. Methods from Extreme Programming (XP), Agile Planning and Lean Development have further introduced improvements.
Takeaway
Attendees will take away a clear view of the challenges and benefits of adopting agile.
Extended Abstract
At the level of experience with agile methods (Scrum, XP, Lean) has grown, there has been an expansion of knowledge on how to apply them to game development. There have also been a number of common problems that has derailed adopting of agile. One example is that agile is often seen as a "silver bullet" for teams in trouble when in fact it exposes all the weaknesses in a company so that focused solutions can be created. This is often too challenging for those introducing agile at their company. There are a lot of Dilbertesque stories to share!
The presentation covers the following topics:
- A collection of experiences with Scrum for game developers that have adopted it shared over the past several years. What are the pros and cons of Scrum? What challenges have developers hit? What changes have they made?
- An overview of the concepts of XP, Lean and Agile planning which supplement the Scrum framework.
- Adoption strategies for developers looking to try or expand agile: How to avoid the pitfalls.
- A retrospective: What should we keep doing, stop doing and start doing?
Past Presentations
GDC 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008
Scrum Gathering 2005
San Diego Software Industry Council 2006
San Diego XP Users Group 2007
Lockheed Martin Agile Conference 2007 |
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 The design of games
 The research on games
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