Win-Win Agile Games. Trusted teams for improved results. The games suggested in this book can be used to improve team building and increase efficiencies at any corporate or education settings

Deliver Better Games Faster, On Budget—And Make Game Development Fun Again! Game development is in crisis—facing bloated budgets, impossible schedules, unmanageable complexity, and death march overtime. It’s no wonder so many development studios are struggling to survive. Fortunately, there is a solution. Scrum and Agile methods are already revolutionizing development outside the game industry. Now, long-time game developer Clinton Keith shows exactly how to successfully apply these methods to the unique challenges of game development. Keith has spent more than fifteen years developing games, seven of them with Scrum and agile methods. Drawing on this unparalleled expertise, he shows how teams can use Scrum to deliver games more efficiently, rapidly, and cost-effectively; craft games that offer more entertainment value; and make life more fulfilling for development teams at the same time. You’ll learn to form successful agile teams that incorporate programmers, producers, artists, testers, and designers—and promote effective collaboration within and beyond those teams, throughout the entire process. From long-range planning to progress tracking and continuous integration, Keith offers dozens of tips, tricks, and solutions—all based firmly in reality and hard-won experience. Coverage includes Understanding Scrum’s goals, roles, and practices in the context of game development Communicating and planning your game’s vision, features, and progress Using iterative techniques to put your game into a playable state every two to four weeks— even daily Helping all team participants succeed in their roles Restoring stability and predictability to the development process Managing ambiguous requirements in a fluid marketplace Scaling Scrum to large, geographically distributed development teams Getting started: overcoming inertia and integrating Scrum into your studio’s current processes Increasingly, game developers and managers are recognizing that things can’t go on the way they have in the past. Game development organizations need a far better way to work. Agile Game Development with Scrum gives them that—and brings the profitability, creativity, and fun back to game development.

It is not difficult to understand why The London System is such a popular chess opening with club players all over the world. Against virtually every Black defence after 1.d4 it offers White an easy-to-learn and reliable set of lines with interesting choices between strategic or more aggressive approaches, while avoiding tons of opening theory. Lately an increasing number of Grandmasters such as Alexander Grischuk, Gata Kamsky, Baadur Jobava, Richard Rapport and even World Champion Magnus Carlsen have played The London System. In this light it is surprising that so little has been published about this fascinating universal weapon. GM Alfonso Romero and FM Oscar de Prado have now filled this gap. In The Agile London System they present both historical material and recent top-level examples to provide a comprehensive overview. The authors explain the typical plans and tactics using illustrative games with clear verbal explanations, and provide lots of tactical and strategic exercises. They reveal the secrets behind sharp ideas such as the Barry Attack and the Jobava Attack and have added an exciting chapter on the especially aggressive Pereyra Attack, developed by the Argentinean master Manuel Pereyra Puebla.

The definitive guide to more effective and personally fulfilling game development with Agile Methods—now revamped to reflect ten more years of experience and improvements. Game development is in crisis—facing bloated budgets, impossible schedules, unmanageable complexity, and death-march overtime. It's no wonder so many development studios are struggling to survive. Fortunately, there is a solution. Agile and Lean methods have revolutionized development in the game development industry. In Agile Game Development, long-time game developer and consultant Clinton Keith shows exactly how these methods have been successfully applied to the unique challenges of modern game development. Clint has spent more than 25 years developing games and training and coaching hundreds of game development teams. Drawing on this unparalleled expertise, he shows how teams can use the practices of Scrum and Kanban, customized to game development, to deliver games more efficiently, rapidly, and cost-effectively; craft games that offer more entertainment value; and make life more fulfilling for development teams at the same time. Contains several new chapters on live games, leadership, and coaching, including an all-new section on Agile for large teams of up to 1000 developers Updates to all chapters to reflect a decade of experience with more than 200 studios Now covering Kanban and other Agile approaches alongside Scrum Understanding Agile goals, roles, and practices in the context of game development Discovering how Agile benefits every specialty in game development from art to QA Communicating and planning your game's vision, features, and progress Game developers and leaders are recognizing the modern challenges of gaming. Game development organizations need a far better way to work. Agile Game Development gives them that—and brings the profitability, creativity, and fun back to game development.

The authors show how to "manage" ingenuity--and "manufacture" the next great idea, in other words they tell what managers need to know about how artists and highly creative people work.

Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit Adapting agile practices to your development organization Uncovering and eradicating waste throughout the software development lifecycle Practical techniques for every development manager, project manager, and technical leader Lean software development: applying agile principles to your organization In Lean Software Development, Mary and Tom Poppendieck identify seven fundamental "lean" principles, adapt them for the world of software development, and show how they can serve as the foundation for agile development approaches that work. Along the way, they introduce 22 "thinking tools" that can help you customize the right agile practices for any environment. Better, cheaper, faster software development. You can have all three–if you adopt the same lean principles that have already revolutionized manufacturing, logistics and product development. Iterating towards excellence: software development as an exercise in discovery Managing uncertainty: "decide as late as possible" by building change into the system. Compressing the value stream: rapid development, feedback, and improvement Empowering teams and individuals without compromising coordination Software with integrity: promoting coherence, usability, fitness, maintainability, and adaptability How to "see the whole"–even when your developers are scattered across multiple locations and contractors Simply put, Lean Software Development helps you refocus development on value, flow, and people–so you can achieve breakthrough quality, savings, speed, and business alignment.

A breakthrough approach to managing agile software development, Agile methods might just be the alternative to outsourcing. However, agile development must scale in scope and discipline to be acceptable in the boardrooms of the Fortune 1000. In Agile Management for Software Engineering, David J. Anderson shows managers how to apply management science to gain the full business benefits of agility through application of the focused approach taught by Eli Goldratt in his Theory of Constraints. Whether you're using XP, Scrum, FDD, or another agile approach, you'll learn how to develop management discipline for all phases of the engineering process, implement realistic financial and production metrics, and focus on building software that delivers maximum customer value and outstanding business results.Coverage includes: Making the business case for agile methods: practical tools and disciplines How to choose an agile method for your next project Breakthrough application of Critical Chain Project Management and constraint-driven control of the flow of value Defines the four new roles for the agile manager in software projects—and competitive IT organizations Whether you're a development manager, project manager, team leader, or senior IT executive, this book will help you achieve all four of your most urgent challenges: lower cost, faster delivery, improved quality, and focused alignment with the business.