Overview:

Learn how Rare changed its culture and approach for developing 'Sea of Thieves' by adopting "continuous delivery". As the result of this change, the Rare team has minimized crunch and has sustainably delivered new features to players. They've had over 100 retail releases so far which means they can learn from player feedback and evolve the game. The bug count has been very low throughout the project as they have invested heavily in automated tests, and consequently they've had a very small manual test team which has reduced cost significantly. Adopting continuous delivery practices isn't trivial; it will take a studio several years. Rare is continuously working to improve their capabilities, so this session will discuss the challenges they've faced and the principles behind the techniques and practices they've used. Some of the challenges include:How to work on a single branch (Trunk based development). How to continuously improve the commit stage. How to change studio culture to adopt automated testing. And finally, how to deal with flaky tests and identify the most relevant and valuable tests.