We played the XP Game last night with 2 teams of 4 people. Team A beat Team B. The XP Game is always a huge amount of fun. And it’s a great way to experience and understand the principles and techniques of adaptive planning and estimation. Lots of interesting comments and insights came out of the iteration retrospectives, and these mapped directly to situations and behaviors the team are experiencing in real-life work. What I found particularly interesting was that Team A described themselves as self-organizing (and this was indeed what we observed as coaches) while Team B felt they missed the presence of a Team Leader. I don’t think this is the only factor that contributed to the outcome of the game, but I’d like to run 3 more iterations with 2 people from each team swapping over. I wonder what would happen?
Here are the pictures from last night:
1 Comment
The parallels between the XP Game and the "real world" implementation are uncanny. Having our coaches suddenly introduce "scope creep" and wanting to change business priority half way through the iteration would be something that most teams experience (at least once) for real.
Whilst the game is fun, the discussions afterwards provide real value (certainly for me) as we associate experiences and identify areas of weakness and strength (not only in ourselves - but in our peers).
Mixing developers and non-developers into the same team would be an ideal way to "break the ice" (introducing a new team to each other - and the business) but also exposes all the jargon in a non-threatening environment.
I'm looking forward to the next time we play - hopefully involving the business. I know they would get a huge amount of value from this.