Scope

Managed Software Development & Engineering Services

The Situation

In late 2018, Minecraft was recognized as the second-best selling video game of all time, behind Tetris, with over 154 million copies sold across all platforms and over 91 million active monthly players. To continue this success, and constantly push itself to delight its faithful players, the Minecraft Product Management team planned for a massive number of new features to better serve outside developers and creators.

Despite the Minecraft team’s ambitions, they found it a challenge to balance an aggressive feature release schedule against addressing their technical debt backlog and maintaining performance. Resource constraints and manual legacy processes also exasperated an already difficult problem.

Virtuosity Engages

With Virtuosity’s strong reputation across Microsoft, the Minecraft team sought out their partnership and support to help accelerate the development of new features, and to evaluate Virtuosity’s execution capabilities.

Within two (2) weeks, the Virtuosity team onboarded a SCRUM team and delivered 30% more stories than originally committed to through both testing and release. Additionally, they proactively developed an automation tool to simplify the content team’s curation process, which reduced process time from eight (8) hours to fifteen (15) minutes. After such immediate and significant impact, the Virtuosity team was deployed across multiple groups to help the Minecraft ecosystem surge forward across both new development and aging backlog.

Achieving Full Potential

Within six (6) months of the initial scope engagement, Virtuosity was delivering critical scalability, integration, development solutions, and release management services across the entire Minecraft platform. They increased development velocity and throughput by 40%, they ensured that new products were now being released with zero (0) defects, and they helped increase Minecraft Xbox ratings by 140%.