An Agile Retrospective

1
(No Transcript)
2
An Agile Retrospective
Clinton Keith
3
Overview

• Retrospective format
• What works (clear wins)?
• What doesnt work so well?
• What do we need to start doing?
• Info gathered from developers
• Talent and leadership still 1

4
Things That Work
5
Iteration

• Making things potentially done on a frequent
  and regular basis
• Inspect and adapt
• The heartbeat of an agile process
• Discover/prove what is fun
• Expose risk
• Refine your plans
• Better communications with your customer
• Reduced cost of fix now vs. fix later

6
Time-boxing
A time-box is a fixed length of time given to
produce results. The results are variable.

• Iterations are a timebox, but content can be
  time-boxed within an iteration as well.
• Quality is a variable that the customer should
  judge based on cost
• Especially good in production, but need to adjust
  timebox for quality improvements
• "Perfect is the enemy of good enough"

7
Agile and Leadership

• The role of leadership in an agile culture shift
  to a mentoring/support role from a command and
  control role
• Creating ownership
• Unity of vision on large teams
• Leads from the front

8
Prioritized Planning
High
Sprint
Release
Value
Cost
Priority
Future Releases
Risk
Knowledge
Low
Lower priority features might get dropped
9
Retrospectives

• Valuable at every level
• Team
• Project
• Company

10
Tools That Help Planning
11
Mind Maps

• Tool for hierarchical knowledge analysis and
  breakdown
• Great for large team planning
• Can export to any format
• We use MindManager from MindJet

12
Value Stream Maps

• Map out work flow
• Focus on waste reduction
• Great for asset production
• Translate directly to enhanced Scrum (Kanban)
  task-boards
• Show the value of collaboration
• Reduced level production costs by 56 using this

13
Extreme Programming

• TDD
• What is TDD?
• Benefits
• Automated testing
• Continuous integration
• Bourne Conspiracy hit Alpha with very few
  technical risks
• Pair Programming?
• What is pair programming
• Benefits
• Challenges

14
What Hasn't Worked So Well
15
Adoption issues

• Scrum is hard
• Changing practices from the start can backfire

Apprentice
Journeyman
Master

• Silver bullet mentality
• XP is controversial
• External pressures
• Management
• Publisher

16
Agile for Artists and Designers

• The shortcomings of Scrum
• Real flow is more complex
• Specialists vs. generalists
• There are no XP-like practices for artists and
  designers
• Lean and Kanban may be the answer

17
Large teams

• Division by discipline doesnt work as well as
  cross-disciplined teams
• A large team can lack a sense of ownership across
  many teams
• Creating local areas of ownership can lead to
  fractured vision

18
Long Term Agile Planning

• Not an exact fit for video game development
• Creates fear with external customers
• Has created a pre-production/production divide on
  planning
• Agile vs. Waterfall

19
Agile PlanningIdeal Waterfall
20
Agile PlanningActual Waterfall
21
Agile PlanningIdeal Agile
22
Agile PlanningGame Dev Agile
23
Agile and Publishers

• 3rd party change is harder
• Switching from planned to iterative
• Ease them into it
• Plans can co-exist with iteration
• Product owner education
• A bad product owner can kill a project
• Leveraging the value of agile teams

24
What we need to start doing (new/more/better)
25
Improve transition

• Agile Transition Strategies
• Coaching Certification

26
Agile Transition Strategies

• Bottom Up or Top Down?
• Beachhead team
• Low cost risk
• Takes more time
• How to spread?
• Creates influence
• Easier to adopt and try all practices
• Entire company
• Requires more coaching
• Takes less time
• More cost risk
• Usually requires command and control
• Inspecting and adapting harder
• An agile transition requires leadership

27
Coaching Certification

• Reading a book is not enough
• The value is not the certificate, but the
  standard of instruction.

28
Lean

• Derived from TPS
• Focuses on waste
• More suitable for asset production than Scrum but
  compatible.
• By looking at the whole stream and standards that
  are continually improved by everyone, it
  encourages a culture of continual improvement.

29
Conclusion

• www.AgileGameDevelopment.com
• www.MountainGoatSoftware.com

Questions?