At last week's Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco, I had the distinct pleasure of sitting down with two of the founders of Bioware. For those of you who don't speak video games, I'll explain who they are. Ray Muzyka, Greg Zeschuk and Augustine Yip sat down in 1995 and decided to update the world of Dungeons and Dragons video games. They started with Baldur's Gate, a graphical D&D game with an expansive, deep story, and with revolutionary graphics and presentation.

Fast forward a few years, and Bioware has gathered itself a reputation as a reliable hitter. The company seems incapable of making bad games, a rarity in the industry matched only by Blizzard and Bungie. Bungie was purchased by Microsoft back in 1999. Blizzard merged with Activision in a multi-billion dollar deal that merged the names as well. Last year, Bioware was picked up by Electronic Arts for a cool US$650 million. Not bad for playing games.

Why am I telling you all of this here, on an enterprise software blog? Because Bioware has a secret super power: the power of agile. I've heard numerous other Bioware employees state that agile was their secret weapon, but last Friday, I got to sit down with Ray and Greg and actually discuss how they implement agile and how it works in an environment where not everyone involved in the process is writing code.

Muzyka said that “clarity of goals is one of the most important things. Whenever you talk to an agile group, you have to have clear goals. You have to know when you're done.”

That's not so easy in a world where your end product attempts to deliver something as metric-squishy as "fun." Muzyka and Zeschuk said that the real secret here is having disciplined experts as team leaders. Zeschuk, specifically, said that these leads then collaborate with underlings to determine how each bit of development fits in with he story, the art and the pacing of the game.

The really interesting thing here, for me, is the integration of artists and writers into the agile process. While the Bioware folks don't go as far as checking in scripts to Subversion, they do include all stakeholders in planning meetings, thus insuring that the coders don't go off and leave writers behind.

"Also, for the big chunks where there's a lot of cross discipline involved: artists, writers, level deisgners, visual effects artists, and many more, it's just been a very effective way to break down the barriers that exist in disciplines," said Zeschuk. "[It] works really well in bringing various disciplines together. Some of our user stories are like, 'Walk from A to B,' but doing that takes 10 people."

Once those stories are written, however, Bioware's pipelines take over. Muzyka and Zeschuk said that the 3D art created for their games tends to exist in a waterfall process, where the artists are simply tasked with "make 100 characters." 

What's the takeaway? Agile planning meetings should include everyone. That means bringing in your business people and your end users, alongside your developers, testers and managers.

As an interesting side note: Ray Muzyka is also soon to play in the World Series of Poker again. In 2006, Muzyka found himself sitting across from Blizzard founder Mike Morhaime in the finals. It's a small world.