Parts on the Garage Floor

  Agile   Scrum   ProjectsAtWork  

On any project, making decisions too early is a source of many costly mistakes in the name of reducing risk or uncertainty. But in game development, planning in isolation or too far ahead can narrow options and increase costs. In contrast, scrum practices require designers to collaborate face-to-face on small, cross-discipline teams, facilitating better solutions in less time.

This is the second in a two-part excerpt from the author’s new book Agile Game Development with Scrum. Part one — “Agile, By Design” — discussed the need to find a balance between documentation and collaboration.

Agile planning practices create a prioritized feature backlog that can be revised as the game emerges. The value of features added is evaluated every sprint. However, many core mechanics take more than a single sprint to demonstrate minimum marketable value. As a result, the team and product owner need a certain measure of faith that the vision for such mechanics will prove itself. However, too much faith invested in a vision will lead teams down long, uncertain paths, which results in a pile of functional “parts” that don’t mesh well together. I call this the “parts on the garage floor” dysfunction.

We saw one such problem on a project called Bourne Conspiracy. In this third-person action-adventure game, the player had to …

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