Agile Lego Game @ SFI
Another interesting thing, besides giving the “Agile approach to SOA” presentation, we did at Studencki Festiwal Informatyczny is conducting XP Lego Game. The game was first presented at XP Day 2005 and then at Agile 2006. Yesterday it was its first public presentation in Poland. The event was organized by Polish Agile Users Group and sponsored by Sabre Polska. What are the rules?
The players are divided into small teams. Each team has a coach/customer assigned. Before every iteration the coach/customer adds some new stories annotated with business value to team’s backlog. It’s up to the team to choose which stories to develop, but they need to remember that their goal is to maximize business value delivered each iteration. So it’s just like in real XP.
And now the fun part. Stories are about building animals! “Give the animal 2 heads”, “Give the animal 4 legs”, “Give the animal 2 wings”… and so on. The team “develops” them using Lego bricks. Each iteration takes about 15 minutes (estimation, development, demo). After that there is a global retrospective where everyone says what went well and what should be done differently the next time. It’s a great opportunity to see Agile in the nutshell. Therefore if you want to learn Agile quickly and to have much fun during that - XP Lego Game is the way you need to take.
Another summary and many more photos you may find at Bartek Bankowski’s blog.