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Timing: 30-60 mins
Ingredients:
- Whiteboards
- Markers
- Set of four coloured sticky notes for each player
Recipe:
Begin by reviewing the four value statements from the Agile Manifesto. Draw on the whiteboard a matrix of complexity on the vertical axis and impact on the horizontal axis with a scale of low, medium and high. Draw out all 9 resulting boxes of the matrix.
Assign a colour (one of the four sticky note colours) to each of the four statements in the manifesto.
Ask all particpants to place each of their four stickies into the appropriate place on the matrix based on their assessment of the impact and compexity the value statement it represents.
Encourage discussion amongst players while placing their sticky notes.
Once completed review what the group has assessed as the impact and challenge of adopting the value system implied by the Agile Manifesto
Learning Points:
- Reinforces and drives meaningful discussion about the Values and Principles of Agile
- Facilitates the discussion about what Agile means to the team and organization.
- Set’s the stage for understanding the purpose and intent of Agile practices and techniques.
Posted by Mike McCullough
VN:F [1.8.4_1055] Rating: 4.0/5 (3 votes cast)
Timing: 10 mins
Ingredients:
- Whiteboards and/or flip-charts
- Markers
Recipe:
Begin by defining what success on a software development project means. Is it only about being on time and on budget? What about customer satisfaction?
Divide the participants in to groups and ask them to, based on their project experiences, come up with a list of criteria that they have noticed as critical elements on successful projects.
Ask them to reach a consensus within their team and have each member sign off on the criteria they agree with.
Look for patterns between each team’s list and then discuss. Compare each teams list with the list that the 17 signatories of the agile manifesto came up with.
You will be surprised at the results, regardless of the participants experience with agile. You will rarely see any team come up with prescriptive practices and I have yet to come across a list that did not include customer collaboration, communication, and team dynamics.
Learning Points:
- The agile manifesto is a set of factors that are considered common on successful projects.
- These successful factors are not entirely new to our industry.
- The agile manifesto does not prescribe specific practices, reaching a wide consensus on these would be very hard.
VN:F [1.8.4_1055] Rating: 4.4/5 (5 votes cast) This post was submitted by Don McGreal.
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Timing: 20 mins
Ingredients:
- Board (electronic or on white board)
- 20-30 Clues
Directions:
Divide the participants in to teams and select someone to choose the first clue category and dollar value. Read the clue out loud and have participants ‘buzz in’ by raising their hands. A correct response adds the corresponding dollar value to their teams total, while a wrong response subtracts the same amount and leaves the clue open for other teams to ‘buzz in’. A response must be in the form of a question! The person who last responded correctly, selects the next clue. A hidden ‘secret clue’ will allow the team that selected it to wager as much money as they want. The team with the most money after all the clues have been read wins.
Learning Points:
- This is a fun and competitive way to review materials.
Posted by Mike
VN:F [1.8.4_1055] Rating: 3.0/5 (3 votes cast)
Timing: 30 mins
Ingredients:
- 2 opposite facing white boards or flip charts
- Markers
- 10-20 clue cards
Directions:
Divide participants in to two teams. One by one, each team member faces off against a member of the opposing team. Both are simultaneously shown the card and immediately start drawing pictures which suggest the word or phrase on a card (see learning points for examples of categories to draw). The pictures cannot contain any numbers or letters. The team members try to guess what the drawing is intended to represent. The team that first guesses correctly, wins a point. This continues until all team members have had a turn or until all the cards have been used.
Learning Points:
- This is a fun and competitive way to review materials.
- Examples of categories to draw: UML models, agile values and principles, roles on a project, design patterns, etc.
Posted by Mike
VN:F [1.8.4_1055] Rating: 3.0/5 (1 vote cast)
Timing: 10 mins
Ingredients:
Directions:
Divide the participants in to teams and have them each write all the letters of the alphabet on their whiteboard. Then give the teams 5 minutes to write down a word that starts with each of the 26 letters of the alphabet. All words must fit within a given category (e.g. agile concepts, patterns, programming terminology, etc.). Encourage participants to be creative, especially with the harder letters.
Award one point for each word.
Learning Points:
- This is a fun and competitive way to review materials.
Posted by Mike
VN:F [1.8.4_1055] Rating: 3.0/5 (1 vote cast)
Timing: 10 mins
Ingredients:
- People and space
- 1 stop watch
- Optionally, something to record the audio with.
Directions:
Have the team sit/stand in a circle. You want to get a story of the last sprint that is told by the entire team. You start by saying ‘Once upon a time , we had a X (insert sprint length here!) week sprint…’. Then, the next person to your left adds to your sentence and this carries on until the last person has spoken or if the story is developing in an interesting direction, until all the points appear to have been made and there is nothing of value coming through. You might want to strictly enforce the time limit for a large team.
After the retrospective , you could run the game again to tell the story of the next sprint, and this should galvanise the improvements that will take place and nicely summarise the lessons learnt and help the team visualise how the next sprint could be better. This game helps to create an ongoing shared goal and represents an oral history of the software process.
Learning Points:
- Discover a consensus view of the success/failures from the last sprint.
- Empower everyone to add value to a collective goal through participation.
- Exercise the ‘responding to change’ learning point from the word-at-a-time letter game.
CREDIT: Mike Sutton
Posted by Mike
VN:F [1.8.4_1055] Rating: 4.0/5 (2 votes cast)
Timing: 20 mins
Ingredients:
- Whiteboards and/or flip-charts
- Markers
Directions:
Divide the participants in to groups and ask them to graphically represent their current development process. Have them think about roles, artifacts produced, and challenges. Invite them to be creative and to not worry about using any formal notation (UML, Gantt Charts, RUP, etc.). Ask them not to use people’s names, or to criticize personalities.
Each team will then then present their creation to the whole group.
Learning Points:
- This is an interesting and fun way for a facilitator to gain visibility in to what is working and what the challenges are in an organization’s current process.
- This exercise also creates more transparency within a team, by giving people a chance to see how others characterize the process.
Posted by Mike
VN:F [1.8.4_1055] Rating: 4.0/5 (2 votes cast)
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