arXiv:2202.06183cs.SE
Video Game Project Management Anti-patterns
Abstract
Project Management anti-patterns are well-documented in the software-engineering literature, and studying them allows understanding their impacts on teams and projects. The video game development industry is known for its mismanagement practices, and therefore applying this knowledge would help improving game developers' productivity and well-being. In this paper, we map project management anti-patterns to anti-patterns reported by game developers in the gray literature. We read 440 postmortems problems, identified anti-pattern candidates, and related them with definitions from the software-engineering literature. We discovered that most anti-pattern candidates could be mapped to anti-patterns in the software-engineering literature, except for Feature Creep, Feature Cuts, Working on Multiple Projects, and Absent or Inadequate Tools. We discussed the impact of the unmapped candidates on the development process while also drawing a parallel between video games and traditional software development. Future works include validating the definitions of the candidates via survey with practitioners and also considering development anti-patterns.
Interesting paper. However, the "solutions" to some of the problems aren't really useful - e.g., the problem of excess scope has the solution of "reduce scope"; and the problem of under-estimated tasks has the solution of "estimate better". i guess it's useful to know the…
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Click the "PDF" link on the right, under "Download". Or use this: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2202.06183
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