Video Game Project Management Anti-patterns

TL;DR

This paper maps project management anti-patterns in video game development to established software engineering anti-patterns, highlighting common issues and proposing future validation with practitioners to improve team productivity and project outcomes.

Contribution

It identifies and relates video game development anti-patterns to software engineering literature, expanding understanding of industry-specific management challenges.

Findings

Most anti-patterns align with software engineering literature.

Some anti-patterns like Feature Creep are unique to game development.

Future validation with practitioners is planned.

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.