Games - Agile and Scrum
Agile, being the most popular methodology, will obviously be very effective and useful for production process in games. It is a set of principles for developing software, Agile projects are characterized by a series of tasks that are conceived, executed and adapted as the situation demands. It involves discovering requirements and developing solutions during the production process of the game through the collaborative effort of self organizing and cross-functional teams. So in game development agile is very useful to find parts of the game that is missing its flare and energy and to make it the best that it can be. Being agile helps the production team to being open to any problems that might need to be or altered or changed, an example of this might be hardware limitations that need to be toned down to run easier. Even though for the most part agile is very useful for game development, it can also have some negative affects on production, one of these problems could be that elements of the game may be faulty, but found towards the end of game development, this could lead to delays in the games release. Also if there are too many problems are changes done through the production process, the game might turn out completely different to how it should.
Another methodology used in game development is scrum, it is one of the most popular and simple frameworks to put the principles of agile in place. The goal of scrum is to improve communication, teamwork and speed of development. It is about empowering a self managing team to deliver and defines roles and responsibilities to create a healthy tension between delivering the right thing, the right way, as fast as possible. So Scrum fits with agile, as it is how the problems faced and the changes needed are delivered to the production team and make sure they know what must be done. Scrum is designed to help teams manage their work and time frames and make sure that work is completed on time. it is designed to help people understand more easily the work they must complete and not get overwhelmed with mountains of different things to do all at the same time. However scrum could also become a problem if the changes and problems faced with agile isn't expressed correctly to the production team. Also because scrum is designed to get production completed as fast as possible, which could result in some problems like, the game could be rushed and not of a satisfactory standard.
In conclusion as with most things, with positives, comes negatives too, as long as the methodologies are executed correctly within the work environment then nothing should go wrong and production should be completed correctly.
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