Software Engineering Practices and Methods in the Game Development Industry
Timothy McKenzie, Miguel Morales Trujillo, Simon Hoermann · 2019
Applying current software engineering practices in the game development industry is a rapidly growing but under researched area. Whether game development studios align to traditional software engineering practices such as agile methodologies to develop their games is not known. It is also unknown how studios perceive their own adherence to such agile development practices. Furthermore, struggling start-up studios could benefit from implementing development practices based on the experiences of established studios. Hence, an exploratory survey was conducted to determine the practice of, and perception of agile game development in New Zealand. The results show that while studios universally state and perceive that they use the agile framework Scrum and sometimes Kanban, their actual practices often differ from these frameworks in key areas. Furthermore, studios collectively overestimated their level of adherence with Scrum. This has general implications for related academic studies as well as for the game industry's own evaluation and improvement of their practices.