In my post Cross-Functional People I talked about the value of generalists and how they prevent agile development from getting really screwed up. I thought it would be good to look to the other side. Are there areas of game development where we want deep specialization and more general skills aren’t really required? My instinctual reaction is yes and they’re most valuable in the parts of games development that are better understood or perhaps to put it better less volatile. They are the areas of development where you perhaps wouldn’t have lots of traditional specializations taking part together so don’t have the problems associated with internal team dependencies. For example a lot of rendering or engine engineering doesn’t have much call for anyone other than software engineers if your automated testing is good. Similarly making high-quality production art is not something you need much in the way of engineering to do once pipelines and tools are good.
Or perhaps a better way of thinking about it is that they still need to be cross-functional people but in a more specific domain. Just as being a cross-functional game developer is a different domain to being a cross-functional OS developer. The wider the scope of the domain the team is tackling the wider the scope of skills you need. In this respect it might be more sensible to consider these domains as specific specialized sub-teams who still work in an agile manner but serve as components to the teams with a wider scope. A good engine team empowers a feature team just as having a solid game at the end of pre-production empowers the content creators and artists to fill the game during production. Although I’d argue that many teams would be better learning something new for tasks with small scope rather than having often messy dependencies with other teams or individuals. For example on a small team it’s probably better in the long-term to learn to write shaders than contract that out to someone else.
So in the end I’m arguing for specialization of the team rather than the individual and that results in a different set of requirements for the functions that need to be filled the team members should still be cross-functional. Further this can only really be an issue in large scale development. Small game teams by necessity have to either learn new skills or contract in specializations they lack. This also speaks to a requirement for large teams to be organised differently as they move through the game development lifecycle.
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