Personal Scrum: uma alternativa ágil para desenvolvimento de indie games

Abstract

The adoption of software processes is a need on system development. Despite the wide amount of processes helping the development of traditional software, when the focus is on game development the situation changes. Besides only having a few formal processes that suit to the specificities for the creation of a game, game developers still have resistance in adopting some of those processes. On big game publishers, variations of traditional processes are still adopted because they can adapt to the profile of developers’ team. However, on the market of indie games, many developers work alone (or in tiny teams) on the entire development process, making the adaptation of traditional, bureaucratic methodologies nearly impossible. The main goal of this work is to propose a process based on Scrum agile methodology. The proposed process is Personal Scrum type for development of games with only one developer. For process elaboration the practices of traditional Scrum and Personal Scrum were analysed, using content analysis methodology. After the process was elaborated, it was validated by an Experimental Study with the students of UNIPAMPA’s Laboratory Digital Games Development course. With the results of this research we can present evidence of the feasibility of using Scrum Personal for game development, since those who used Personal Scrum had higher productivity than those using ad hoc processes and, for the satisfaction questionnaire, we had a higher number of positive responses from developers using Personal Scrum. This research, while having a small sample in the Experimental Study, was able to provide a solid foundation for future work that could consolidate Personal Scrum as a viable, effective process.