What can development teams learn from MOBAs (and vice-versa)?

Here I was playing solo Q (expression that means playing alone, with no pre-made party) when I had a sudden revelation which may be the missing link between casual or competitive games and our daily work!

Competitive online games match the player with unknown people when playing on the Solo queue mode. These improvised teams will have to cooperate in order to achieve victories and earn points. These events often lead to good and bad mechanisms that we are going to analyze one by one and see how we can apply -the good stuff- on our daily work.

Come and join me in this Epic Crossover!

Let’s start with the MOBA team to Development team flow.

MOBA teams know their common goal:

A key component in groups of random people who don’t know each other is the shared common goal which is plain simple and straightforward: Destroy the enemy base (or core/nexus/etc).

Do you know the goal that your team and your company are pursuing? Can you see the greater purpose which is lying beyond your everyday tasks? Are the other team members fully aware of this objective? Would you perform better if you had a clear and shared vision of a common goal to accomplish?

Each team member has one or two specialized roles:

It may be tank and carry, or bruiser and mage, or maybe support and a combination of the other roles, but people will naturally lean into roles that they feel more comfortable with, and will gain expertise while performing on these roles. The positive gain will arise when there is a situation that would require some of the team members to perform in roles outside their specialization (for example a carry that has to play support role during one game). This would require predisposition to play in something they are not experts or they don’t like as much as playing their main roles, but would also require general knowledge about each of the roles in the game in order to cover at least the minimal functions expected.

Do you know the basics of another role aside from your main one? Could you or anyone on your team help with basic testing, documentation or unit code writing if the situation required it? If the answer is no, then this might be a good chance to learn a bit about the other roles in your organization. This concept is called the T-Shaped team.

The team’s result depends on the combined effort and success of each team member.

If the tank protects the team, the support heals and the carry… carries, and in general the team does cooperate and makes good shotcalling, then it is very likely that the outcome of the game will be good for all. There might be situations where the whole team is having a bad time and a single talented individual may carry the game, but that doesn’t happen very often. Usually a team with motivated and focused team members which know the objective and are well communicated will achieve good results more often than not.

Have you ever met an IT team where there was a single person doing well (maybe a dev was outperforming or a QA was finding a lot of valid issues) and the rest of the team was doing poorly? How often will a team in this state reach a good result? Is the sprint going to be successful? Will the team deliver everything that was planned?

The Meta changes and players adapt:

Meta stands for “most effective tactic available” and it basically refers to the team composition, items set, runes, combos, powers spikes and strategies that are prevailing during a specific time period. As new characters and items are added and balance changes are applied in order to keep the game in a healthy state, the meta changes as well and players learn the new best prevailing strategy in order to keep themselves in top competitive form.

Do you keep yourself up to date with the new technologies and technical skills?

If you get stuck with a single technology and mindset, as time goes by there is a good chance that you might become obsolete and get slowly cast out of the market demands. The same could be said about methodologies: Probably a person that worked the entire life using the Waterfall life cycle model and never learned a bit of agile will have lesser chances of fitting into a modern dev team when compared with someone that did learn continuous iteration of development and testing process.

Now on the opposite direction (From Agile Teams to MOBA teams):

Agile Teams do retrospective meetings:

At the end of each iteration, the team does reflect on what happened during the last sprint and then identifies actions for improvement going forward. These action items are executed during the next iteration in order to improve the issues or concerns that the team identified.

Have you ever reflected about what can be improved from that last game you had?

If you are playing Solo Queue you and your anonymous teammates probably won’t be seeing each other again, so reflecting with them about what can be improved is unlikely going to happen. However, if you are doing premade (meaning that you are in a premade group with one or more friends), then you can do it for sure! Even if you are doing Solo Queue you can reflect about your own mistakes during the last game and how you can improve.

Agile teams are composed of people who may be diverse in their skills, yet respectful of each other:

In every team’s life cycle there are times to converge and times to diverge. However, team members and their facilitators always ensure a healthy atmosphere, where everyone feels safe to speak their opinions and people are able to talk about their issues with respect for each other.

Have you ever been in a game where everyone on your team is flaming? Have you ever been flamed or flamed someone else? Did you notice how worse your performance and that of the team member who is being flamed gets? On the other hand, did you notice how the chances of coming back from a bad game increase if everyone is keeping cool and not venting their anger all the time?

What are your thoughts after reading these parallels? Do you think that the IT and MOBA worlds have elements in common and examples that link each other? Do you spot other genres and activities that may have similar dynamics?

Thanks for reading!

Mariano Cardoso

I’m a Scrum Master and Quality Assurance Analyst with ~12 years of experience. I’ve been working in Spark digital for 3 years. I love reading articles about agile methodologies and of course, playing video games!