Agile, By Design

  Agile   Communications Management   Scrum   Stakeholder Management   ProjectsAtWork  

The call out for certainty from stakeholders has amplified with the cost of longer development efforts and the communication overhead on larger teams. Detailed design documents attempt to create that certainty, but at best they only defer its reckoning. Finding the balance between documentation and collaboration is the challenge for every designer on an agile team.

This is the first in a two-part series excerpted from the author’s new book Agile Game Development with Scrum.

When I first started working on games professionally in the early nineties, the role of designer was being instituted throughout the industry. Following the mold of prominent designers such as Shigeru Miyamoto and Sid Meier, designers were seen as directors of the game, or at least the people who came up with many of the ideas. The role required communication with the team on a daily basis but not much written documentation.

As technical complexity, team size, and project durations grew, the role of the designer became more delineated. Some projects had teams of designers who specialized in writing stories, scripting, tuning characters, or creating audio. Hierarchies emerged to include lead, senior, associate, or assistant designers, among others.

The overhead of communication with large teams and the cost of longer development efforts led to a demand for certainty from the …

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