Games and Agile Software Development

Agile software development practices have been finding their way in to various industries; finance, education, government, and even games.

The latest issue of developer magazine Gamasutra includes a project postmortem of Brütal Legend, the action-adventure video game from Double Fine Productions. The team decided to use the Scrum methodology, hoping to find a process that was a better fit to the iterative design style they used when building their previous game Psychnoauts. Executive production Caroline Esmurdoc said:

"Within the first few months of Brutal Legend development, the team was practicing Scrum, and the initial payoffs were impressive. Scrum's emphasis on features over systems, on rapid prototyping and iteration, on cross-disciplinary teams, on people over process, and on the creation of a potentially shippable piece of software every sprint/milestone made the game playable at a very early stage in development."

Agile development practices in game development have been receiving some press over the last few years. Coach Clinton Keith has a website about agile development in games. At the Agile 2009 conference, 2D Boy developer Ron Carmel spoke about how the World of Goo team used user experience testing to improve their game. And there have been other articles in Game Developer magazine, plus several resources on the web about Scrum development and games.