The Blog

Members of the Agora Production and QA team attended the first Kitware-sponsored Tech Valley Talks on Tuesday. Clarke Foley, Production Coordinator, and Devon Smith, QA Team Lead, represented Agora amongst a who’s-who of Tech Valley companies. Nicholas Ruepp, Producer at Vicarious Visions (VV), spoke about how the successful game studio adapted to the Agile Development process during the production of Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 in 2007.

At this time, VV implemented 3-week sprints, burndown charts, and retrospectives, along with cork boards as a project-tracking tool. The “Big Wins” that were realized with the Scrum/Agile processes included seeing a steady level of effort from developers throughout a project life cycle, rather than the typical waterfall process and it’s subsequent employee burnout.  Also, the new iterative planning allowed day-to-day developer overhead to be very low, and the entire company shifted its culture to a more cross-discipline mentality.

Bill Hoffman, VP and CTO of Kitware Inc. began his presentation with a very poignant fact; “the use of Agile is intended to remove waste from the development system”. There are seven common inefficiencies that many game and software development companies face. These include partially done work, extra features, relearning, hand-offs, task switching, delays, and defects. Through Kitware’s adaptation of the Agile process, they have been able to reduce inefficiencies in their workflow. Hoffman’s token Agile ideology is the differing of feature commitment as long as possible. Doing this allows for flexibility while keeping options open as long as possible. According to Hoffman, having high-speed production must be enabled by inherent quality standards; the job of testing is to prevent defects not to find them.

Hoffman mentioned that Kitware uses Mantis Issue Tracker, Visual Tool Kit, and Python scripts to create burndown charts. While the tools don’t always make the mechanic, it is interesting to see which is preferred. At Agora, Pivotal Tracker and Lighthouse are the primary Agile Project Management tool and bug trackers. New testing tools for support of iterative software development include Cucumber, Rspec, and Litmus along with Siege for load testing. Overall, we look forward to the next Tech Valley event. We hope to hearing about other Capital Region technology firms and how they are increasing their production and profitability with the Agile Development process.