Scaling Agile Game Teams
- The Solutions in This Chapter
- Challenges to Scaling
- Should You Scale Up?
- Scaling the Wrong Process
- The MAGE Framework
- The Product Backlog
- Team Organization
- Product Ownership
- Additional Roles
- Releases
- Sprints
- Managing Dependencies
- Distributed and Dispersed Development
- What Good Looks Like
- Summary
- Additional Reading
There is no single formula for scaling Agile on a game project. Clinton Keith presents practices that have been successfully used with game teams of more than 1,000 developers spread across dozens of studios.
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Although the ideal Scrum team size is five to nine people, modern game development efforts typically require far more developers (see Chapter 1, “The Crisis Facing Game Development”). Sometimes these developers are distributed across multiple locations. Although Scrum is designed to be scalable, large teams need to add practices, realign roles, and take precautions in how they organize teams and foster communication so that the increasing challenge of getting large groups of humans to align can be overcome.
The Solutions in This Chapter
This chapter explores a framework of scaling that is unique to game development. The main areas of focus are
Product Backlog organization
Team formation
Product ownership
Release and Sprint practices
Managing dependencies
The practices of distributed and dispersed teams
Together, the practices described here have been successfully used with game teams of more than 1,000 developers spread across dozens of studios.