Certified ScrumMaster for Game Development course at IGDA Leadership Forum

I'll be giving a Certified Scrum Master for Game Development course on November 2-3 in San Francisco before the IGDA Leadership Forum.

This two-day course provides the fundamental principles of Scrum through hands-on experience and interactive project simulation. During the course, attendees will learn why such a seemingly simple process as Scrum can have such profound effects on an organization.

Attendees learn to apply practical, project-proven practices that have worked for numerous video game projects

• The essentials of getting a project off on the right foot
• How to build a product backlog and plan releases
• How to help both new and experienced teams be more successful
• How to successfully scale Scrum to large, multi-continent projects with team sizes in the hundreds
• How to help producers, artists, designers and programmers work together effectively
• How to work with publishers and others outside the team who may not be familiar with Scrum
• Tips and tricks from an instructor with 15 years of game development experience, 7 years of experience applying Scrum to game development author of the book Agile Game Development with Scrum.

Participants who successfully complete the course and follow-up test, will become Certified ScrumMasters through the Scrum Alliance and receive a two-year membership in the organization where additional ScrumMaster-only material and information are available.

Registration
The course is being held just prior to the Leadership Forum on November 2nd & 3rd at the Airport Marriott (same location as the Forum).  Pricing details and registration can be found here.

More details for the course material can be found here.

Any questions? Contact me!

Book link - Agile Retrospectives

Here's a book that must be on every ScrumMaster's book shelf:

Retrospectives are among the most commonly overlooked, yet most important agile practices.  Without the "inspect and adapt" cycle of teams examining how they work together, there is little chance that they'll enter the state of continuous improvement.

Agile Retrospectives shows you how to best facilitate this essential practice and to keep it fresh by choosing from many different types of retrospectives.   It offers great advice on eliciting feedback from everyone and digging deep into underlying issues.

Retrospectives will be the topic of my IGDA Leadership Forum 2010 session.  We'll be talking about the best flow for retrospectives and running a few of them to discuss how well the Leadership Forum functioned.

Video: Kanban for Video Game Development

The video of my presentation at the Lean Systems Software Conference in Atlanta in April:http://www.infoq.com/presentations/kanban-video-game-dev

This session describes how Lean Production and Kanban has been applied to game development. Lean principles and Kanban tools have been used by a number of developers, including the presenter, to slash production costs by over 50%. As a complement, or replacement, to Scrum, Lean/Kanban provides predictability, transparency and optimization for complex game production. 

What makes a creative company? Ed Catmull interview

Many great pearls of wisdom here.  One of the main things that stood out was the regular postmortems that occur.  What he describes is very close to agile retrospectives.

- "Fundamentally, successful companies are unstable."

"Agile Game Development with Scrum" book is shipping!

I'm very happy to announce that the book is shipping from Amazon!

Thanks to my manuscript reviewers: Bendik Bygstad, CJ Connoy, Jeff Lindsey, Erik Theiz, and all of 38 Studios, Jason Della Rocca, and Senta Jakobsen. Their level of detailed feedback was tremendous and added a great deal of value to the book.

This book took almost two years to write. During this time, I received much feedback and advice from those who downloaded draft chapters and helped steer the direction the book took: Bas Vodde, Chris Oltyan, Diogo Neves, George Somaru, Heather Maxwell Chandler, Jamie Briant, Julian  Gollop, Karen Clark, Lia Siojo, Lyssa Clark Adkins, Martin Keywood, Paul Evans, Philip  Borgnes, Robert Bacon, Ron Artigues, Rose Hunt, Scott Blinn, Sheldon Brown, Steve Sargent, Wanda Meloni, LaRae Brim, Keith Boesky, Aðalsteinn “Alli”  Óttarsson, and Barbara Chamberlin. Extra thanks to Justin Woodward for all his artistic help and advice!

To Bruce Rennie, Michael Riccio, Rory McGuire, Stephane Etienne,  Caroline Esmurdoc, Shelly Warmuth, Chris Ulm, and Alistair Doulin. I thank them for letting me use their words.

Robbie Bach and J Allard Leaving Microsoft

Two of the best people I met at Microsoft are departing. 

I have a few outstanding memories of these guys.  Around 2000, when the Xbox was in development, I was visiting Microsoft to talk about Midtown Madness 2.  This intense but friendly bald guy pulled me aside, shoved a huge controller in my hand and asked me what I thought about it as a console interface.  He was very open and inquisitive and I ended up talking to him for about an hour.  I later learned he was the lead designer for the Xbox.  I like designers who are inclusive and want to test their ideas.  I like them a lot.

Robbie was a class act.  Around the same time we (Angel Studios) were struggling to get a contract signed for Midtown Madness 2.  We had lost money developing MM1, but it turned out to be a big hit, so we were asking for more reasonable terms on the second.  Microsoft management was having none of it and we were months into the project, burning through a lot of money without a signed contract.  The game was about to be terminated.

Robbie called our CEO at home on Saturday morning, got right to the point with him and the two of them came to an agreement in a few minutes.  Doing this was several layers below Robbie's pay grade, but that's what good leaders need to do sometimes. 

I wish them both the best of luck and hope they enjoy their well deserved time off.

AGD Book: Sample Chapter Posted

A sample chapter of my book Agile Game Development with Scrum has been posted on InformIT.  This chapter describes the impacts on the designer role when on an agile project.

You can read it here.