distributed-methodology

Introduction

This document provides an introduction to the methodology. It includes definitions and principles appropriate for incorporating the methodology into an academic studio course.

Definitions

It will help our communication to establish some definitions. We are one studio that contains different teams. The students are therefore team members. The professor wears a few different hats: as a project mentor, he coaches you toward productive success; as an executive producer, he tries to keep you on track; as an instructor, he tries to teach you new things that will be useful to you and is responsible for reporting a grade and assessment data to the university.

A production day is a day after the preproduction period that is not set aside for any other purpose. An iteration or a sprint is a period of time during which the team makes progress on a set of goals. Each iteration begins with a planning meeting, during which that iteration’s goals are established. Each iteration ends with a review meeting, during which the results of the iteration are compared against the goals, and a retrospective meeting, during which the team reflects upon and improves their processes. Each iteration produces an increment, also known as a potentially shippable product or an executable release.

There will be opportunities to update the methodology as part of each retrospective meeting.

Background and References

We recognize and seek the seven properties of highly successful projects, which are summarized below:

1. Frequent Delivery
2. Reflective Improvement
3. Osmotic Communication
4. Personal Safety
5. Focus
6. Easy Access to Expert Users
7. Technical Environment with Automated Tests, Configuration Management, and Frequent Integration

We uphold the value of safety through practices inspired by Anzeneering. In particular, Joshua Kerievsky’s articulation of Stop Work Authority in software provides guidance to us on how to maintain safety in the studio, whether in-person or distributed.

We take an iterative and incremental to building software.

• Iterative means that we work in iterations, with each iteration of production being bookended by a planning meeting at the beginning and review and retrospective meetings at the end.
• Incremental means that each iteration produces an increment that is an executable release or potentially shippable product. That is, each iteration produces a playable game.

We believe that software—including video games—are made by human beings, and so we respect the Heart of Agile.