UCLA Game Lab presents Clinton Keith Game Development with SCRUM Workshop

Posted on March 8th, 2011
by Alex Rickett

Scrum is an iterative, incremental framework for agile software development. Clinton Keith combines his experience as both video game developer and Agile practitioner to apply Scrum philosophy to the unique challenges of video game development. Blizzard, Lucas Arts, Apple, and EA, are just some of his myriad well known clients.

From Wikipedia:

Scrum is a process skeleton that contains sets of practices and predefined roles. The main roles in Scrum are:

  1. the “ScrumMaster”, who maintains the processes (typically in lieu of a project manager)
  2. the “Product Owner”, who represents the stakeholders and the business
  3. the “Team”, a cross-functional group of about 7 people who do the actual analysis, design, implementation, testing, etc.

During each “sprint”, typically a two to four week period (with the length being decided by the team), the team creates a potentially shippable product increment (for example, working and tested software). The set of features that go into a sprint come from the product “backlog”, which is a prioritized set of high level requirements of work to be done. Which backlog items go into the sprint is determined during the sprint planning meeting. During this meeting, the Product Owner informs the team of the items in the product backlog that he or she wants completed. The team then determines how much of this they can commit to complete during the next sprint, and records this in the sprint backlog.[6] During a sprint, no one is allowed to change the sprint backlog, which means that the requirementsare frozen for that sprint. Development is timeboxed such that the sprint must end on time; if requirements are not completed for any reason they are left out and returned to the product backlog. After a sprint is completed, the team demonstrates how to use the software.

Scrum enables the creation of self-organizing teams by encouraging co-location of all team members, and verbal communication between all team members and disciplines in the project.

 

Clinton Keith will be giving a workshop on game development with SCRUM this Thursday in the UCLA Game Lab. Spaces are limited, RSVP today.

Check out the event page here: http://games.ucla.edu/games/scrum/