Agile Game Development with SCRUM (Addison-Wesley Signature) Quotes

“A ScrumMaster’s role on the team is compared to a sheepdog. They guide the team toward the goal by enforcing boundaries, chasing off predators, and giving the occasional bark.”
― Clinton Keith, Agile Game Development with Scrum

“Games as a Service is the future of the industry. Even large AAA franchises are transitioning to shipping minimal games that they can use to grow through live support over time.”
― Clinton Keith, Agile Game Development: Build, Play, Repeat (Addison-Wesley Signature Series

“Who plays your game? What do they want to do with it? What frustrates them? What problems are they trying to solve? What is the competition doing or not doing? What are your strengths? These are typical questions that live games allow us to measure and experiment with. The goal of planning is not only to answer such questions but to learn more about our players and what the market wants so that we can grow that community of players.”
― Clinton Keith, Agile Game Development: Build, Play, Repeat (Addison-Wesley Signature Series

“Dispersed teams must have the ability to adjust their practices and working agreements to meet their challenges and needs. No two dispersed teams are alike, so their Sprint practices cannot be entirely standardized. Areas of team self-organization include: Deciding core hours where communication is assured among every team member. Determining which online tools to use to plan, track, share, and communicate Sprint work. Deciding what to share and what not to share with stakeholders within a Sprint (see “Transparency” above).”
― Clinton Keith, Agile Game Development: Build, Play, Repeat (Addison-Wesley Signature Series

“A dispersed team shares the same challenges as a distributed team. Additionally, it is challenged with maintaining transparency, collaboration, self-organization, and the need to leverage the tools available in the best way possible.”
― Clinton Keith, Agile Game Development: Build, Play, Repeat (Addison-Wesley Signature Series

“A dispersed team has each of its members in separate locations. The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 saw a massive increase of dispersed teams due to many developers transitioning to working from home, where they could be physically isolated from one another. Distributed teams have the advantage of co-location for each team. With proper inter-team management, such teams can overcome most challenges described in the next section. Dispersed teams, on the other hand, have a much more significant challenge. The daily communication within the team is constrained by members’ physical separation and the tools they use. Very often, such teams lose the cohesion necessary for a good team and simply become a “group of individuals” with far less engagement and productivity.”
― Clinton Keith, Agile Game Development: Build, Play, Repeat (Addison-Wesley Signature Series

“The goal isn’t to find ways to utilize everyone’s time fully. To respond to work that couldn’t be planned for, there has to be a certain amount of “slack” available. Ultimately this slack, which allows everyone to respond quickly to problems, is more effective than attempting to plan it all away.”
― Clinton Keith, Agile Game Development: Build, Play, Repeat (Addison-Wesley Signature Series

“The following are the principles and practices that team members need to understand in preparation for their first Sprint: They are committing to Sprint goals as a team, not as individuals committing to their own tasks. The entire team will succeed or fail on this basis. Overcommitting is not a great danger, because they can renegotiate with the Product Owner during the Sprint. Teams new to Scrum are more likely to underestimate their work. Commitment is reciprocal. Management will not change their goals or the Sprint review date without a Sprint reset. The Definition of Done must be clearly understood between the team and the Product Owner. The functionality delivered at the end of the Sprint must reflect this definition. The rules of the Daily Scrum are understood. The purpose and utility of the burndown chart are understood.”
― Clinton Keith, Agile Game Development: Build, Play, Repeat (Addison-Wesley Signature Series

“Helping developers find flow in their work involves finding the appropriate level of challenge while they increase their skills.”
― Clinton Keith, Agile Game Development: Build, Play, Repeat (Addison-Wesley Signature Series

“Turning a Vicious Cycle into a Virtuous Cycle Sketching out feedback loops is very useful when approaching a systems thinking model. For example, I often see the cycle occurring in Figure 20.1. Figure 20.1 The vicious cycle of distrust This vicious cycle increases distrust between management and development as each side games the other to protect itself. Less work gets done, and quality suffers. A significant role of leadership is to identify these vicious cycles and find ways to turn them into virtuous cycles. We do this by changing the vicious cycle of distrust into a virtuous cycle of trust. The greatest opportunity to begin this is in the Sprint Planning and Review meetings and to reinforce it during the Sprint.”
― Clinton Keith, Agile Game Development: Build, Play, Repeat (Addison-Wesley Signature Series

“W. Edwards Deming said, “A bad system will beat a good person every time.” This is true. Servant leaders should start with finding what led the system to beat someone, rather than blame them. They need to be a student of system thinking and to continually explore better ways of working.”
― Clinton Keith, Agile Game Development: Build, Play, Repeat (Addison-Wesley Signature Series

“Team self-management and organization challenges the lead role definition. It’s difficult for many leads to give up making detailed decisions for teams on a daily basis and allow them to risk failure, even for smaller challenges. However, the benefits of growing self-management becomes apparent as some of the more mundane management duties of a lead, such as task creation, estimation, and tracking, are taken over by the team.”
― Clinton Keith, Agile Game Development: Build, Play, Repeat (Addison-Wesley Signature Series