Requirements

• Big box of Legos
• One set of Story cards per team
• Small teams of 4-6 participants
• Coaches – one coach per team
• One stop-watch per team or a visible wall clock

The Setup

One of the coaches explains that the game is an attempt to introduce some of the Agile practices, mainly from an XP perspective. They give an overview of some of the practices and then provide an overview of how the game is played. There will be 3 iterations which will proceed as follows:

1. Discuss and estimate stories using rock-paper-scissors (1=easy, 2=medium, 3=hard), prioritize and sign up for the stories they think they can get done, based on the iteration time ( ~ 5 minutes)
2. Run a development iteration
3. Hold a retrospective of the iteration (what went well, what went badly, what you didn’t understand, what to try differently next time)
4. The coaches provide their feedback & insights as to what they saw happen

Iteration One

• Discuss and estimate the stories (4 min) – The coach will give the first iteration’s stories, then the teams will rank each story from easy (1 story point), medium (2 story points) or hard (3 story points).
• Sign up for stories (1 min) - Next they will choose the stories they can get done in the iteration, using a combination of their estimates and the business importance as a guide.
• Development (10 min) - Let them loose with the legos.
• Retrospective (5 min) - Each team should run a retrospective, and then have a spokesperson from each team present the results.

Iteration Two

• Discuss and estimate the stories (4 min) – The teams should estimate the new stories, based on estimates for the first iteration. Emphasize that the estimation should be consistent, not exact.
• Sign up for stories (1 min) - The same as before, but now the teams should only sign up for the amount of points they actually completed in the previous iteration.
• Development (10 min) - As before, but they are now building onto the previous iteration.
• Retrospective (5 min) - Each team should run a retrospective, and then have a spokesperson from each team present the results.

Iteration three

More of the same. Introduce more stories, play them, discuss. By iteration 3 we can start talking about velocity – show the team that they could at this point make a good estimate as to how long it would take to play all the cards. If things go well we could look at an estimate calculated at each iteration, and show how it improves over time.

Closing Hold a group retrospective so everyone can share their perspectives on learning about agile.