Customer Reviews

Agile Game Development with Scrum (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Cohn))

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Scrum and game development go together as well as chocolate and peanut butter. In this book, Clinton Keith does a perfect job of showing how to put them together.

The book is split into five parts. The first part describes the crisis facing game development because of the explosion in complexity and game size. Not wanting to end on a down note, Part 1 also describes how agile/Scrum address these problems. Part 2 is probably the best overall introduction to Scrum anywhere. I now even recommend this Part (100 pages) to my non-game development clients. Part 3 goes deeper into many of the specific challenges facing game projects--planning, creating cross-functional teams from such a variety of disciplines, and reducing the overhead of iterating. Part 4 dives deeper into the specific disciplines and offers great advice in the areas of art, audio, design, qa, and production. The concluding part contains 3 chapters describing some of the challenges you'll face, how to work with a publisher, and how to start.

This is a great book that is chock-full of stories from author Clinton Keith's fifteen years in the game industry. The writing is crisp and conversational with topics covered in just the right amount of detail. The hand-drawn look of the illustrations match the book perfectly.

Agile Game Development with Scrum should be required reading for anyone on a game project. And it offers a great deal to anyone starting out with Scrum.

Thank you, Clinton, for making the time to write this truly wonderful contribution to the Scrum/Lean/Agile Community of Practice.

What makes this book stand out among the many dozens of Scrum/Lean/Agile community of practice is that Clinton writes from genuine experience. He doesn't sugar coat his mistakes. He doesn't belabor his considerable skills. He simply outlines what he has learned about making really great games. Through Scrum, Lean, and Agile.

What I appreciate this book is the detailed advice that is exclusively devoted to the field that Clinton knows so well. Instead of creating a "one size fits all books", Clinton concentrates his writing to creating games. As the Founder of a serious games company, I know that Clinton's advice is spot on.

If you're in the game industry, and you want to learn how to create better games, get this book.

Luke Hohmann
CEO, The Innovation Games® Company
[...]: The seriously fun way to do serious work -- seriously.
Follow me on twitter at lukehohmann

Drawing from his own experience as developer and CTO in the game development industry, Keith Clinton has written a book that provides both an overall vision of the Agile and Scrum approaches combined with a detailed practice of these principles in the specific context of game software development. It gives therefore also a good introduction to the software practices of the gaming industry. I noticed for instance that the customer - outsourcer relationships are not very different from the relationships between game production companies and external developers.

The book is well written and easy to read, with a lot of practical experience that Clinton Keith retrieved from his own professional career and contributions from other people involved in agile adoption for game development, especially in the "Myths and Challenges of Scrum" chapter.

Although it might naturally have a stronger appeal to game software developers and project managers, this book provides a lot of practical consideration that will be useful to a larger audience interested in transitioning to Agile.

Agile Game Development with Scrum teaches Scrum's goals, roles and how to add stability to the development process. It shows how to be flexible with Scrum, how to adapt it to produce complex games on a budget, and how to integrate Scrum into current studio practices. Any game developer should have this!

Clinton Keith has written an outstanding and well researched book that explains the application of scrum to agile game development.

Developing quality games on budget is an extremely difficult task, and as teams grow larger and projects become more ambitious over longer development timelines, this problem is just getting worse. Agile Game Development with Scrum explains clearly and concisely a battle-tested methodology for reducing risk, reducing cost and building in quality. If you are professional game developer or would like to be, you owe it to yourself to read this book!

First of all, I'm not native American/English. My language is Catalan and my English skills are not perfect (althought I have no problem understanding it, but not writing).

I'm now at half of the book. It's quite good explaining Scrum, which is it's main objective, and also have some advices based on the author's experiences (or other scrum users). Also it is focused on game developement, and as scrum is not a rigit set of rules but more a list of good practices, it explains how to adapt them to the game developement world.

I'd highly recommend it, if you want to learn what scrum is, and how to adapt it to game developement.

Clinton is a rare find. Not only is he supremely knowledgeable in all things Agile and Scrum, he also has years of industry experience to back him up. Reading this book lets you access all of this knowledge and experience with amazing detail and clarity.

Whether you have taken one of Clinton's Scrum courses or not, this book is perfect for all game developers. It provides an excellent overview of many important topics and digs just deep enough into each one to give insightful feedback without bogging down in minutia.