The Role of Agile Methodology Use and Feedback Attributes in Game Development Projects: Implications for Game Project Quality

Game development projects adopt agile methodology to leverage its flexibility when final design and consumer’s tastes are highly uncertain and unpredictable. Although close customer collaboration is an important success factor for agile methodology, agile development teams in game industry have difficulties in working closely with their end-users. As a result, team members tend to take advantage of game testers’ feedback to see whether the features meet the player’s tastes. Feedback from testers contains technical and aesthetic aspects that contribute to the quality of a game, that is, stability, functionality and playability. This study argues that specific and immediate feedback from testers can best facilitate the agile methodology use to achieve the game project quality. We conducted a field study with a paired-match questionnaire. 47 pairs of game producers and developers in different game development projects participated in the study. The results indicated that both feedback specificity and feedback timing strongly moderate the agile methodology use on the game project quality. More specifically, feedback specificity has negative moderating effect whereas feedback timing has positive moderating effect. Both theoretical and practical implications are discussed.