Hi, I'm John,
I am a post-graduate student at the University of Warwick studying for a Masters degree in Programme and Project Management. 50% of the final mark for my degree is based on a research project. I have chosen to study the application of Agile Project Management methodologies (including Scrum, XP and Lean production) in game development environments. This research will ideally involve collecting data by conducting short, structured interviews with producers, project managers, team leads and dev team members as well as carrying out a number of case studies on various projects (some using agile practices such as Scrum and others using traditional ‘waterfall’ methods) in order to observe how different development strategies are applied on different project.
The aim of the project is to determine whether or not agile practices have a positive effect on game development projects in relation to:
- Reduced development costs
- Reduced development schedules
- Improved scope/feature assessment
- Improved quality of working life for members of development teams (i.e. reduced crunch times, better team integration etc)
As this project is a formal, academic and scientific piece of research confidentiality is paramount, therefore participants in the study are guaranteed that company and individual names will not be used without permission.
I have industry experience working in QA departments at two of the UK’s most successful developer/publishers and aspire to work as a producer/project manager in the games industry in the near future. I have a great deal of interest in the subject matter and am enthusiastic about furthering the advancement of computer/video game development as a subject for academic research.
If anyone feels that they could assist with this research in any way (even just by spreading the word among the game development community) it would be greatly appreciated if you would contacy me at;
[email protected] or [email protected]
Please feel free to contact me if you have any further questions regarding the project.