Video Game Project Management Anti-patterns

Project Management anti-patterns are well-documented in the software-engineering literature, and studying them allows under-standing their impacts on teams and projects. The video game de-velopment industry is known for its mismanagement practices, and therefore applying this knowledge would help improve game devel-opers' productivity and well-being. In this paper, we map project management anti-patterns to anti-patterns reported by game de-velopers in the gray literature. We read 440 postmortem 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.