Distributed Agile Game
Intent
The intent of this session is to expose participants to the challenges faced by distributed agile teams, to allow them to discover ways to mitigate those challenges, and to have fun.
Summary
The Distributed Agile Game is meant to be played by people who are interested in challenges experienced by members of distributed agile teams. The participants may have prior experience in distributed development, but this is not required. In fact, no software development experience is required.
The game will be played by several small teams. Each team consists of analysts, developers, a customer, and a project manager. The team is subdivided into two parts; an on-site team, with developers, a customer, and analysts, and a remote team with only analysts and developers. The remote team must communicate with the customer and on-site team via emails, phone calls, and other various forms of communication. The teams will be using a physical medium to construct the “application” according to the customer specifications.
The game will start out with the most basic of communication and no tool-sets progressing through several iterations. At the end of the last iteration the teams should have figured out more effective means of communications than what they were originally given emphasizing the most important factor to the success of distributed agile teams: communication.
Intended Audience
This session is suited for anyone who has experience in agile and/or non-agile projects, as well as, anyone who may be involved in distributed projects in the future. This is not suited for someone looking for the golden answer to “How to make a distributed agile project work” but more for the people who would like a concrete way to experience this type of environment without having actually been in it and for those who would like a way to express what distributed agile means to others who may not fully understand the challenges such team setups may bring.
Benefits
Attendees will have fun learning from their peers while being exposed to challenges faced on all distributed teams and practices that will assist them in running agile and distributed agile projects more smoothly.
History of Tutorial
This exercise was presented at Agile 2006 Conference.
P.S: We’ll need a lot of people to help us. If you are planning to attend the conference and interested in helping us, please ping me
Content Outline
Introduction: 35 mins
- 05 Minutes - Introduce the presenters and their backgrounds
- 10 Minutes - Description of the activity, it’s rules and participant’s roles
- 05 Minutes – The coach will give a blank description of the system that is to be built so that all participates have the same base knowledge to go from.
- 05 Minutes - Team formation – self organize into roles
10 Minutes - Release Planning and acceptance criteria - cards can be passed off to dev in this 10 Minutes
- Customer and analyst create backlog – both on-site and remote analysts participate
First Iteration: 35 mins
- 15 Minutes - Iteration 1
- Developers start work on story cards as soon as analysts pass them off
- 5 Minutes - Showcase Preparation
- 5 Minutes - Showcase/Review
10 Minutes - Retrospective
Team suggests possible changes. The facilitators expect the teams to generically express pain points and problems which can be used to segue the session into introducing new practices.
Second Iteration: 40 mins
- 20 Minutes - Iteration 3
- Facilitators put changes discussed in retrospective for iteration 1 into place.
- Analysts continue on additional story creation and answer any questions developers have regarding stories they are currently working on.
- Developers work on stories.
30 Minutes - Break
Continuation of the Second Iteration: 20 mins
- 5 Minutes - Showcase Preparation
- 5 Minutes - Showcase/Review
- 10 Minutes - Retrospective
- Team suggests possible changes. The facilitators expect the teams to generically express pain points and problems which can be used to segue the session into introducing new practices.
Third and Last Iteration: 40 mins
- 20 Minutes - Iteration 3
- Facilitators put changes discussed in retrospective for iteration 1 into place.
- Analysts continue on additional story creation and answer any questions developers have regarding stories they are currently working on.
- Developers work on stories.
- 5 Minutes - Showcase Preparation
- 5 Minutes - Showcase
- 10 Minutes - Retrospective
Conclusion: 30 mins
- Facilitators will ask the audience to indicate what they learned.
- Facilitators will convey any learning objectives that may not have been stated.
- Audience Questions
- Feedback on session
- Suggestions from audience on how to improve the session.
Infrastructure Required
The presenters will provide all equipment with the exception of a projector. For the session to be effective, the presenters will need a room with an adjustable partition in-between.