Presented by Clinton Keith, CTO High Moon Studios.
Since High Moon has started using Agile methodologies, cross-discipline team collaboration has been a hot topic. Clint addressed the Goals, Impediments, Solutions, and Tools which relate to cross discipline collaboration.
Agile isn’t about process — it’s about leadership. Its goals are reducing waste and making products (i.e. games) better, cheaper and faster. It’s also about collaboration and teamwork; the core of success.
It is important to understand that the people who make up traditional game teams — artists, designers, developers — speak different languages. They need to learn to understand each other, and a great way to do this is to bring them together. That leads to questions about organizational structures, which in themselves can detract from collaborative efforts. Rewarding your people because of their skills instead of their teamwork or collaboration abilities is fine, but can result in silos where people don’t need to collaborate. Clinton showed a diagram showing the lengths people go through in a typical organization to get a bug fix.
Impediments such as team size are major problems — sizes between seven and eleven are optimal, but most console game projects require 50 or more people. The schedules for all of these teams MUST match for success, but they never do. The small size is key here because it keeps problems manageable. The flow of work is another place where too many people and parts causes problems. Resource constraints, dependencies and so forth prevent solid progress and demoralize the team.
Another point that Clinton made is an astute observation about the overhead of hierarchy. Concentrating on roles and organization can easily lead to getting hung up on responsibility.
To solve these problems, a company needs to make radical changes. High Moon has an open floor plan where people can team up at will. An active work environment is promoted, and while it causes some chaos, it keeps people thinking and alive. Remove artifacts from spiral development process which reduce face-to-face time.
The Agile environment where teams have immediate focus (as opposed to the organization) offers a great amount of feedback for members of that team. People get ownership on the project, and they succeed or fail together. Anonymous peer reviews give people a chance to talk frankly about progress. Finally, keeping the team together whenever possible gives people a feeling of ownership, which is the most important sociological aspect of agile.
Clinton described a team building exercise where his team took a mountain biking trip to Colorado. He relates that the best way to get the team to work together is to save their boss — which he found out the hard way by falling off a path and breaking a rib. (Don’t try this at home, kids!) Of course, Clinton doesn’t recommend this at all, BUT it is clear that the team will learn together and bond together when they understand there is a common goal to be solved.
Play testing on games gives focus on specific issues — the team gets to see the enjoyment or disappointment of real consumers. This is invaluable since they give the kind of feedback that the team can’t provide
Solutions are many, but one of the most important is to clearly define roles in the company. What does a game designer do? What areas and responsibilities do they posses? Without an equal footing for all of your team members, there will inevitably be questions and possibly even strife.
So what is “Agile”? Clinton described different ways to approach an Agile development environment. Bascially, the goal is to add transparency to your organization and allow you to act upon problems. You can be the most transparent company in the world, but if you aren’t fixing the problems that surface, you aren’t Agile. Scrum, for example, comes from the sport rugby. It’s being used primarily as a software development tool, but it has been used in manufacturing and other areas. When it comes down to it, Scrum is a box of practices that work together — try not to break the way that they fit together.
High Moon has used Scrum as a development tool, but what about art and design? What tools can be used for those groups? They have found that Lean and Kaizen (“continual improvement at every level”) offer a solution for all groups. Kaizen assumes that something always needs fixing, and that improvement of the whole often requires a cross-discipline approach. The “Stop the line” mentality improves quality and makes life better for everyone.
Clinton discussed Value Stream Map tools. These allow you to visualize the flow of real work so that you can reduce waste and cycle time. More collaboration means fewer hand-offs, and the shorter path means fewer things in play at the same time. This process allowed them to take a 16-week cycle and turn it into a one-week cycle, that produced 1/7th of the assets. That’s a 44% improvement in output! Best of all, it was driven by the artists and designers and required no new technology.
In summary, every culture is different and while the prinicples are the same, you will find that some things work and some things don’t in your environment. Pick a metric to focus on and follow that — for example, the daily ratio of stable builds from the continuous integration system. Take that data and make it real by displaying it to the team, and give them a chance to improve it, and to take responsibility for the improvement.
www.agilegamedevelopment.com — Clinton Keith’s own Agile game site
www.lostgarden.com — Daniel Cook’s site for XP for game development
www.projecthorseshoe.com — site for the 2007 Project Horseshoe conference
