Congratulations Sony Online!

Free Realms Reaches 8 Million Registrations!

Free Realms was developed using Scrum by SOE.

Over half a dozen SOE developers have become ScrumMasters in one of my past Certified ScrumMaster for video game development courses.

Congratulations Riot Games!

Riot's League Of Legends Sees Over 1 Million Downloads.

Riot uses Scrum for developing and their developers have spoken about the experience.

Product Owners and Innovation Games(r)

A product backlog needs to be well thought out.  Are we prioritizing the right features?  Are the features really what our customers want?  Are we missing anything?

The least effective product backlogs come from limited viewpoints or from seemingly endless boring meetings dominated by a few voices.  They result in one-dimensional backlogs whose vision isn't understood or shared by the team.  This impacts the potential of what a game can be.

How can backlog creation be made more collaborative, innovative and effective?  The best way I've found is to introduce gaming to backlog creation. 

In search of solutions, I recently attended an Enthiosys Innovation Games (r) Master Class for Scrum trainers in San Jose run by Luke Hohman.  Innovation Games (r) have been used in a wide range of product design and is the subject of a great book.  For two days, we practiced selecting, running and facilitating each of the game types.  Some of the games I'd used in past training (like "Product Box").  Most were new.  It really opened my eyes to the science and psychology behind such games and the power they hold.

In March, I'm planning to attend the first Certified Product Owner training class designed with Innovation Games(r) with Luke and Mitch Lacey, an excellent Certified Scrum Trainer, in Seattle.  I'm very much looking forward to attending this class.  I highly recommend it for any product owner, especially those working on video games.

I can't imagine a better application of gaming for product planning than for video games!

If you can see this post, everything is working

You've either changed the feed location or the redirect has worked.

This could have been easier!

The blog has been moved.

The new address of this blog is now:
http://blog.agilegamedevelopment.com/

Apologies for any inconvenience.  Blogger is dropping their FTP service, which is what I used in the past.

Blog move complete

The new blog address seems to be working!

Agile Game Development Blog Moving....

Blogger is soon going to drop the publishing service I've been using, so I need to change it.  As a result, this blog's feed will become http://blog.agilegamedevelopment.com

Blogger is promising me that this change will be transparent to you and that the old address will redirect your readers to the new address.  

See you there!

Congratulations Bioware!

I just received my copy of Mass Effect 2, developed by Bioware in Edmonton, Canada, a client of Clinton Keith Consulting.

I met the developers of Dragon Age late in the game's development and was bombarded with a wide range of insightful questions about Scrum and agile in general.

The ME2 team I met was talented, well led and experienced in using agile practices (having adopted agile during ME1).  They explored lean practices for ME2 production and spoke about them at GDC.

Bioware has always been at the forefront of exploring ways to improve their development processes.  Talent, vision, focus and leadership are in abundance there.   They understand that Scrum is merely a tool for leveraging those attributes and that continual improvement is a necessity.

Congratulations to both teams and Bioware!

Agile Video Tip - Applying Kanban to Support Teams

New 5-minute video up on my website (at the bottom).  Applying Kanban practices to support teams that use Scrum.