In 2011, Google spent $5.2 billion on research, up 37 percent over 2010’s rate.

On what, you ask?

Robots. Elevators to outer space. A nationwide fiberoptic network. Energy created from hog waste...

Google’s vast array of engineering projects includes the sublime, the ridiculous, and just occasionally, the ingenious.

Is it all worth it?

Last summer, I had the good fortune to visit a “very advanced” Agile shop. These folks really did embrace agile methods with a discipline, completeness, and a zealous fervor that would be hard to match. In many ways, they could have been a poster child for Agile methods...But these weren’t productive developers freed from mindless process dogma. They were Agile slaves. The dogma they followed was ours, and they followed it well. And as with many organizations in a similar position, they saw some promising results. Continuous integration, refactoring, unit tests, pair programming—all these techniques yielded some benefit. But they weren’t thinking, they weren’t reacting, they weren’t being agile. When problems came up, they addressed them with all the grace and elegance of a deer caught in the terrifying blaze of alien headlights. They knew how to do Agile; they didn’t know how to be agile.

Below, you'll find two videos: one about the lab, and one containing a case study of the team at work. Watch them both. If you have questions, JB has generously agreed to make himself available to answer them in a future post. Just leave your question as a comment to this post. If there's sufficient interest, we'll expand this MVP.

The story most of you are talking about is story telling being told in text, cut scenes, voiceover, and machinima. None of that is a game, its other media squeezed in between what is a game. Games have emergent stories, or what I prefer to call drama. That's the thing that happens when you are the last counter terrorist trying to defuse the bomb in counterstrike. Quake, and Doom had drama, modern AAA games have Story telling.

Originally a waterfall shop, we transitioned to Agile development about two years ago. We entered the process largely blind and have had to feel our way in the dark until we found processes that worked for each team (you can read more about our transition here). Now entering our third year with Agile we’re continually trying to improve the efficiency, productivity and velocity of the various teams. Levels of Agile adoption span the full spectrum across our 6 Scrum teams. Some teams are still working to get beyond the gated approach of various phases and approval cycles while other teams are beginning to break down the silos of roles and focus on team-wide problem solving and velocity.

If you know me, you know I'm not a big fan of Scrum. I don't like the hand-waving concept of Velocity and I don't like the fact that it places a priority on process over code. XP, I feel, is a much more important for software development. Agile (aka customer responsiveness) can be achieved without the dogma. But that's not the point of this post. In this post I want to question the value of timeboxing and the benefits that modern revision control systems grant developers. So, stick with it, I spend some time setting it up before getting into the meat of the post.

The daily stand-up is a window into the motivation level of the team. Stand-ups with motivated teams are noisy, complex, often chaotic, and information rich. They often seem like football huddles when the score is tied and there are no timeouts left in the final two minutes of the game. There is humor, intensity and a sense of "being in it together".

The stand-up meeting for an unmotivated team is different. It's common to sense the boredom or an impatience for it to end. It often feels like a group of individuals reporting to the ScrumMaster, who is writing everything down, or even worse, with everyone sitting at a conference table looking at a projection of a spreadsheet on a wall and only paying attention when it's their turn to report.

A tedious daily stand-up meeting is a symptom that the team lacks one or more of the factors of intrinsic motivation. It's often easiest to examine the team's autonomy and the practices of the ScrumMaster, whose role is to foster and grow autonomy.

In Scrum workshops, I often ask developers if they have ever compared the game that they last shipped against the original design document. The usual answer is that, except for the title, much of the design changed during development.

I’m fascinated by the way Facebook operates. It’s a very unique environment, not easily replicated (nor would their system work for all companies, even if they tried). These are notes gathered from talking with many friends at Facebook about how the company develops and releases software.

I call this post non-sterile agile because I feel that once agile principles are let loose into the corporate world agile development changes its nature and face. In this (and hopefully upcoming posts) I will try to go through some of the ideas and experiences I have about agile development in the corporate world.

Continuous Deployment isn’t just an abstract theory. At IMVU it’s a core part of our culture to ship. It’s also not a new technique here, we’ve been practicing continuous deployment for years; far longer than I’ve been a member of this startup.

At long last, some of the actual implementers of the advanced systems we built at IMVU for rapid deployment and rapid response are starting to write about it. I find these on-the-ground descriptions of the system and how they work so much more credible than just theory-type posts that I am excited to share them with you. I can personally attest that these guys know what they are talking about; I saw them do it first-hand. I will always be full of awe and gratitude for what they accomplished.

Agile Logic helps companies deliver better software faster. Our unique Absolute Agile approach blends the best lean and agile methods to reduce risk, maximize benefits and ensure continuous improvement.

Kevin Schlabach posted recently on his Agile Commentary blog about using a "Snake On The Wall", a lightweight approach he's used to help his team get a handle on the things that are slowing their development process.

Rapid Application Development (RAD) processes such as Agile, Scrum, and the like, simultaneously pose an opportunity and a threat to achieving a quality user experience. It all depends on how it's handled. The standard methodologies as described in books don't work in practice, if you care about the usability of your products. But small modifications work wonders, as we found when studying how Agile works on real projects.

By 'Tasty Cupcakes', we of course mean experiential learning games that accelerate the adoption and understanding of Agile principles in a fun and interactive way.
Below are games (in the form of recipe cards) that we have found useful in learning settings.