On September 23, 1999, NASA's latest planetary probe, the Mars Climate Orbiter, began its orbital insertion maneuver to enter Mars orbit. It was never heard from again. The subsequent investigation determined that the likely cause was that one component of the software system was communicating measurements in imperial units, while the rest was communicating in metric. The discrepancy in the measurements resulted in the orbiter crashing on Mars rather than orbiting it. As summed up by a NASA executive: "The problem here was not the error; it was the failure of NASA's systems engineering ..read more

Recently, the following article has been making the rounds: "Failed #SquadGoals Spotify doesn't use "the Spotify model," and neither should you." The article claims, with backup from former employees, that the famous Spotify development model -- popularized by articles, videos, and books created largely by Henrick Kniberg -- was never very successful at Spotify, and organizations should ignore it. If you are not familiar with the Spotify Model, Google it. It describes Spotify's culture and practices for scaling, team formation, engineering, Lean, Agile, etc. The articles describe overco ..read more

In my agile coaching journeys, one of the things I see misused the most is the User Story. User stories were challenging to embrace for us at High Moon Studios. We were very document-driven, and User Stories just became another form of detailed documentation for us. Our coach Mike Cohn worked hard to wean us off of our desire to write everything down, but we fought him at first. We stapled 10-page documents to the 3x5 index cards he told us to use. When he discouraged that, we found ways to fill the index cards with tiny printed fonts. Even when we switched to the Connecxtra Template: “As a ..read more

Back in the early nineties, I had the privilege of working at a game studio occasionally visited by Shigeru Miyamoto. Miyamoto arrive every few months and play the game we were developing for Nintendo. He didn't care about the schedule or budget. He only wished to know if we had "found the fun" yet. Finding the fun is one of the most significant areas of uncertainty in a new game's development. Shipping a game that isn't fun is a considerable risk. Risk is the impact on your plan caused by uncertainty. Uncertainty is also an essential part of game development. Think of all the great game ..read more


 We’ve all experienced it: A sink stacked high with dirty dishes. You rarely have time or incentive to tackle them. Usually, you’re in a rush to do it before a visitor arrives or when you run out of clean dishes for your next meal. Eventually, most of us learn that washing the dishes once a day (or at least throwing them in the dishwasher) is a better approach. It takes a little discipline to get into the habit…similar to flossing your teeth every day, but it’s for the better good. The same principle applies to game development. We often let the crud in our games pile up. We call this ..read more

We all want to make great games and not suffer making them, but sometimes it doesn't work out that way. Below is a list of 6 typical signs that the game you're working on is in trouble. 1. Your bug database is growing out of control I'm not a fan of bug databases to begin with. They are often rugs to sweep dirt under, and that dirt gets more expensive to clean over time. All that debt has to be paid off, and it's often paid off with crunch and compromise. We should be spending time at the end fine-tuning the experience of the game, not making it barely shippable. 2. You Don't See the Big P ..read more

Simulated Annealing for a Travelling Salesman We've all seen it. The larger a game team, the more dependencies between developers and teams emerge to slow development down to a crawl. The problem of dependencies is a complex one. They are called NP-complete" problems, usually only solved by time-consuming brute force approaches. So forget about an easily managed solution. The best approach has its analogy in computer science called "simulated annealing," a technique where you start with an approximate solution and add a bit of change from time to time and see if it improves the solution. Th ..read more

A battle among homeowners is a lesson for studio leaders. We live in a neighborhood in Colorado that borders a vast national forest.  We have lots of dirt roads, utilities, a lake, and dense forest, which require a great deal of work to maintain.  Volunteer neighbors have done much of this work, but over the past few years, volunteerism has declined. This community also has a Home Owner Association (HOA) that likes to pass many rules.  For instance, you need to fill out a form to move a rock in the common area. If you don't wear non-flammable clothes while using an outside fire-pit, you are ..read more

I recently finished the first draft of the new edition of "Agile Game Development." One of my reviewers commented that I still use the phrase "Sprint Commitment" after its removal from the Scrum Guide, but I left it in there. One of the reasons that the phrase is no longer in the Sprint Guide is because it has often been weaponized to force teams to complete everything they'd estimated in Sprint Planning regardless of what problems emerge during the Sprint. This has resulted in teams compromising quality to get every feature in the game "done" by the end of the Sprint. The Sprint Guide now u ..read more

Game development used to all be "project-based" . Projects have discrete beginnings and endings  aimed at developing a game which was then released, completely debugged on a cartridge or disc. Following this, a team would then move on to another project. As a developers, I always felt a bit of sadness at shipping a game I'd worked on for many months and starting fresh from scratch on a new one. With the spread of the internet in the 90's, PC games had the advantage of allowing upgrades and expansions after a release and a few developers stayed with a game for its entire life. Some popular MMO ..read more