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I am following the Minecraft story with interest. I think it is the best example of a game made with Agile developing practices: Individuals and interactions, w

I am following the Minecraft story with interest. I think it is the best example of a game made with Agile developing practices: Individuals and interactions, working software, customer collaboration, responding to change. Notch has been in very close contact with the players of the game throughout development, and has a keen sense of what this mass of people is looking for.

plinkplonk 15y ago
Success has a thousand fathers. All successful projects are retrospectively "agile" (or so the agilists claim). There are no agile projects that fail (including the original Chrysler project whose sponsors shut down the program and threw the team (consisting of the agile founding fathers) out. In that case you just redefine failure. If you can show that Mojang does TDD, 'story' card walls, velocity tracking or kanban pipelines or any of the concrete "developing practices" (to use your term) pushed by the agile consultant folks (vs some motherhood "values" that can be retrospectively applied to any successful project try say Google+ instead of MineCraft and you could call it an "agile" success story too) then you'd have more of a case.[1] Otherwise you could label any successful project anywhere "agile". [1] I am not saying Mojang doesn't do "agile". Maybe he does - in which case a comment that explained which concrete practices he found useful would be great. I am just tired of agilists latching on to any and all successful projects and calling them "agile" to the point where "agile" becomes a synonym for "successful".
- tjogin 15y ago
  Many of the updates have introduced bugs that, from an outsider's perspective, ought to have been obvious. If I were a gambling man, I'd bet they don't do any kind of automated testing. Add Notch's peculiar reservations about Git to that, I suspect that agile practices are way too advanced for their team. I'm just speculating of course, as are we all. Just saying that from my perspective, they don't look like a team using agile practices. They don't look like a team using any kind of standard industry practices at all, really. Disclaimer: I love Minecraft, play it all the time.

plinkplonk 15y ago

Success has a thousand fathers. All successful projects are retrospectively "agile" (or so the agilists claim). There are no agile projects that fail (including the original Chrysler project whose sponsors shut down the program and threw the team (consisting of the agile founding fathers) out. In that case you just redefine failure. If you can show that Mojang does TDD, 'story' card walls, velocity tracking or kanban pipelines or any of the concrete "developing practices" (to use your term) pushed by the agile consultant folks (vs some motherhood "values" that can be retrospectively applied to any successful project try say Google+ instead of MineCraft and you could call it an "agile" success story too) then you'd have more of a case.[1] Otherwise you could label any successful project anywhere "agile". [1] I am not saying Mojang doesn't do "agile". Maybe he does - in which case a comment that explained which concrete practices he found useful would be great. I am just tired of agilists latching on to any and all successful projects and calling them "agile" to the point where "agile" becomes a synonym for "successful".

tjogin 15y ago
Many of the updates have introduced bugs that, from an outsider's perspective, ought to have been obvious. If I were a gambling man, I'd bet they don't do any kind of automated testing. Add Notch's peculiar reservations about Git to that, I suspect that agile practices are way too advanced for their team. I'm just speculating of course, as are we all. Just saying that from my perspective, they don't look like a team using agile practices. They don't look like a team using any kind of standard industry practices at all, really. Disclaimer: I love Minecraft, play it all the time.