Premortems in Game Development Teams: Impact and Potential

Abstract

Software design teams need methods to evaluate plans as part of agile development processes. The premortem is a cognitive, structured, analytic technique that supports team plan evaluation and re-planning. Few empirical or longitudinal studies involving premortems exist. Ten game development teams (n=68 members) conducted premortems early on during a year-long game development project. Teams provided initial ratings of their game design plan, then conducted a premortem, and revised their plans. In the premortems, teams identified 17.8 unique reasons on average for project failure and 16.7 mitigations to those failures. Reasons for project failure focused mainly on game design execution, team communication, and game complexity (e.g., too many levels, branching). While most teams identified solutions for these challenges, surprisingly few teams revised their plans to scale back the game design complexity.