A very easy to set up and play game about understanding technical debt. In 30 minutes, all players and observers will have had an A-HA moment of understanding on these topics :-

• what technical debt is
• how it gets created
• how to remove it
• how to stop it from ever being created again
• what sustainable pace means for a development team

All development teams should be exposed to this game at some point to help them improve their development process and practices.

All development managers should be exposed to this game to help them understand the role they play in technical debt and eliminating it.

"Agile processes promote sustainable development. 
The sponsors, developers, and users should be able 
to maintain a constant pace indefinitely." - Principle behind the agile manifesto

Whether a team is brand-new or seasoned veterans at working together, explicitly defining and/or refining a team working agreement will help the team to align on how they will work together effectively to meet their common goal. In this fast-paced hands-on session, participants will go through the process of building a team working agreement using LEGO Serious Play (LSP).

Creating a team working agreement helps team members set the stage for effective communication and high performance by making assumptions about ‘what really matters to us’ and ‘how we will work together?’ explicit and negotiable.  Great working agreements address some difficult topics - what values do we share? how do we want to deal with conflict when it comes up? how will we handle problems within the team? - which are often challenging to discuss openly and honestly, especially when a team is first assembled.  

This session will show you how to use LEGO Serious Play to encourage a frank and fearless discussion in order to kickstart these discussions so that a team can quickly create a powerful set of simple guiding principles for working together.  Participants will learn about the importance of team working agreements in creating team cohesion and common understanding of shared values and operational guidelines, and experience hands-on how to use the LEGO Serious Play cycle of build-share-reflect to have a participatory discussion to identify shared values, explore reactions to conflict, and build a set of simple guiding principles.

The goal of story telling is to communicate the selected message in a way that it could be easily consumed by participants. The message is presented as a metaphor (as opposed to being literal) and  could be understood on several levels. Participants are expected to engage in a conversation and respond in kind. There are two basic ways to respond, a) in support of a message and b) to confront and undermine the message. Both of these avenues shall be explored.

Such a communication required a definite skill and involves, first understanding what the message is and second, selecting the avenue to support the message or to undermine it. The wrong thing to do is to respond with an unrelated story. This will surely break the flow between both parties and make them stop communicating.

In a most common and practical scenario, software developers get together to relate stories about famous defects that "brough the building down". Participants in turn provide details of a specific related defects. Creating an organizational memory about famous defects is a great method to prevent such defects from future occurence.

Conflict isn’t inherently a bad thing – it’s inevitable when people are working closely together on things that they care about. In fact, diverging viewpoints can bring new insights to help teams move forward and create something new. Dealing with conflict head-on is challenging for many people, yet few teams spend time explicitly considering “how will we work together when things get rocky?” Teams need to build the skills to be able to navigate through rough times together and come out with win-win solutions.

This workshop will present useful models for considering team conflicts supported by games teams can use to develop and practice conflict resolution skills. The models address underlying drivers of conflict, modes for responding to conflict, assessing conflict severity to determine appropriate interventions, and the patterns of principled negotiation. The games build on the concepts to help participants gain insight and develop important skills in a non-intimidating and memorable way.

Better teams create better outcomes.  A liftoff (as described in the book Liftoff by Diana Larsen and Ainsley Nies) at the outset of a new endeavour helps teams set the stage for betterness by cocreating a shared understanding of purpose, establishing alignment and understanding the context of the work they will do together.  While the activities to include in a Lift Off will vary according to team and context, the practice of Agile Chartering - collaboratively developing a lightweight yet effective roadmap for the project and the team - is key to aligning and inspiring people to do better work together.

The purpose of an Agile Chartering workshop is to give all stakeholders of a project a voice and the opportunity to co-create a common understanding of the project dynamics, its purpose and context. It creates co-ownership of the project within the project team and thereby higher commitment to the project goals.

In this workshop, we will explore the objectives of Agile Chartering and foster  a playful approach to doing this work. We'll talk about what kinds of games can be used to cocreate Purpose, Alignment and Context with a team, and run at least one game that can be used for each of the elements of an Agile Charter

You will be surprised to learn that Improv Teams and Agile Teams have many similarities.  The same techniques Improv Teams use to turn a group of random individuals into a powerful Team can be used by Agile Teams to improve Collaboration, Creativity, Communication & Trust.  I will challenge your assumptions about meetings and playing games at work.  We will play several of these 3 minute games so that you can see how they help each of us become a better team player.

This unique workshop will have attendees out of their seats and on their feet actively practicing the concepts presented during the short lecture, thus proving how warm-up games from the world of Improv will build Great Team Players.  Practicing the four essential qualities of a Great Team Player, i.e. Collaboration, Creativity, Communication and Trust, not only shows attendees how they can become a Great Team Player, but also how to train others within their organization.  This hands on workshop provides immediately actionable material for participants to use on their first day back to work.  Additionally, attendees will see first hand how playing Improv warm-up games create Great Team Players, which can move freely from team to team within their organization.

What makes an agile game great? The right mix of accurate—staying true to the principles and practices it teaches—and engaging—giving students a reason to care about the outcome so they'll play (and learn) from the heart! This is especially important when teaching or learning Kanban, which requires deep understanding in order to bring about real change and measurable results.

In this session, we'll take a deep dive into one specific tried-and-tested great agile game. Using the open-source getKanban Version 2.0, we'll step through its game mechanics and review, in some detail, how each design decision helps to illustrate the fundamentals of Kanban. Along the way, we'll review a few key Lean principles and show how the game enlivens those lessons. When we're finished, you'll be ready to download the free getKanban game kit and play by yourself, or with your team, or even run your own big getKanban session with multiple play teams!

Our first half covers the basics of getKanban Version 2.0 for new players, plus a review of limiting WIP, creating a pull system, and working in cross-functional teams. Experienced Kanban trainers and coaches can also learn some new techniques for facilitating the game.

In our second half, I'll show you the adjustments I've made to getKanban Version 2.0 to guide players to their "a-ha" moment—a deep, personal experience they feel and remember. Now, instead of just the basics of how a Kanban board works, my students understand how to detect and solve problems that impede their flow. I see the difference when they leave the game and go back to work. My new open-source hacks to Version 2.0 will help you illuminate Lean principles for your clients and teams, and teach them to achieve real results faster.

After revolutionizing the automobile industry, Lean principles have been successfully applied to different knowledge areas including software development. This workshop is intended to master Lean concepts like Waste, Push&Pull systems, systems thinking, Kaizen etc. & practicing cross-functional collaboration, self-organisation and safe-fail experimentation! In this interactive game, the participants will work in a small production lines, experiencing problems and applying Lean practices to overcome them.

Every executive wants you to start their project NOW, believing that starting sooner means the project will end sooner. There is a big problem: their resources are limited and have to be shared across many projects, forcing all the projects to sub-optimize.

Tired of being time-sliced across too many projects? You can use this game to prove to your managers that this kind of multitasking is costing them a fortune. This interactive game demonstrates the problems with multi-tasking across multiple projects and benefits (in money!) of focusing on fewer items to deliver greater value for all projects.

Come, build upon concepts from Critical Chain Project Management, Lean, and Agile, as we illustrate the power of focus for tackling one of the hardest concepts in project portfolio management.

The key to Scrum team effectiveness is continuous improvement that can be realized through the inspect-and-adapt opportunity: the retrospectives. Retrospectives help the teams inspect on their strengths and weaknesses and come up with strategies to become stronger every sprint. The biggest challenge for geographically dispersed teams is finding ways to leverage the essence behind the Agile value statement "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools" and behind the principle that states, "The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-face communication." However, by using some good collaboration tools, we can reap the benefits of face-to-face communication to some extent. Retrospectives play a vital role for distributed teams as well as collocated ones, and by using some good online collaboration tools, these inspect-and-adapt ceremonies can be really made effective!

This workshop will be an actual hands-on workshop where environment of distributed team is simulated, people actually participate and do an online retrospective using their laptops by playing the games under retrospective techniques at “Luke Hohmann Innovation games” website https://innovationgames.com/content/vc/instant

Published games:

1. Fly High 2. Team Journey 3. Team Craft 4. Mountain Trekking

These games have been published on Innovation games website, that use very effective metaphors that enable the team to wear a different thinking hat while doing the retrospectives.

This session would definitely be an eye opener for distributed teams, for doing retrospectives at ease. It is a lean way of doing a retrospective that saves a lot of time, automatically collates the discussion points of all the participants on just a single click of button. And the most important thing, it is really fun playing this. Teams would really enjoy this! The three game themes that are going to be used for this workshop are based on some realistic scenarios that enable the teams to really relate to what they are doing.

Cross-functional teams are the essence of the Agile development process. When the team is built, the expectations are that the team members will contribute to the best of their abilities to the team success. However, the latest social studies demonstrate that experts of different disciplines are not bound to collaborate well. What is the reason? For one, there is no common ground to recognize each other expertise. The silos which exist between different sciences and crafts manifest themselves when cross-functional team is built. Many cross-functional teams become dysfunctional only because the team members don’t recognize and respect each other’s expertise.

What is the root cause of such phenomenon? According to social scientists, the reasons lay in fast pace development of each professional discipline. Every community of practice has their own body of knowledge supported by latest research in their field, develops their own lingo, cultivates their own culture, and recognizes their own authorities. Without a conscious effort to understand the specific skills of the new team members, each practitioner has a superficial understanding and little trust in other practitioners’ level of expertise. Additional steps are needed for the team members to establish “common language” when discussing their everyday tasks, discover optimal solutions and select most efficient ways to reach team goals.

The purpose of the workshop is to introduce the framework for cross-functional team collaboration that is supported by latest research in social studies. The game format is suggested in order to prevent the professionals from recycling their own biases. Through game activities and focused exercises, participants learn how to recognize the expertise of their team members and establish common jargon for better collaboration between practitioners of different disciplines.

Developed by Alistair Cockburn, this amazing workshop seems to be about learning how to slice stories extremely thinly, but with every round I've run proves to be so much more.  After group discussions of why small stories are a good idea, value delivery curves, and techniques for splitting stories, participants build a backlog for a small application.  Then, in five eight-minute sprints, they build it!  The workshop typically closes with rich conversations about the experience and how participants will apply it to their work.

For Agile Games 2015, I would like to extend the session to help others learn how to facilitate this workshop.  I believe it is a must-have in the toolkit of every coach working with software developers in an Agile context.  While you can use Cockburn's instructions or Henrik Kniberg's excellent facilitation guide, I'd love to help people get a head start through experiencing the workshop and talking to someone who has run it before.

Learn, Play, Hack the game Cards for Agility.  Cards for Agility is a “Work Safe” game similar to Apples to Apples and Cards Against Humanity.  You will learn about the game, play Cards for Agility and then as part of the workshop participants will brainstorm new cards and topics for the Agile2015 Cards for Agility expansion pack. This expansion pack will be made available in for the game by the end of the conference.  Each attendee will get a copy of the game on a USB that they can print and use immediately and the winner at each table keeps a the physical game at that table.

Game Centered Learning techniques are hot right now in the Agile community for good reason, they foster engagement and learning in a safe environment.  We have been interested in the use of games for learning as a key part of our training/coaching toolkit for years and decided to develop a game that people could easily extend to help them, help others learn Lean/Agile topics.    Cards for Agility is released under the Creative Commons 4.0 Attribution Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)  as a Free Cultural Work so please feel free to hack it as you see fit.

Our goal for this session is fairly straight forward

• Introduce people to “Cards for Agility”
• Train people play the game
• Train them to hack the game
• Set it free into the world

A new twist on an old favorite.  Using Legos and other building artifacts at hand (log cabin sticks, cardboard, tape, paper, duct-tape etc) teams of 4-5 people must design and build a cell phone tower in 90 minutes using four ten-minute sprints.   It begins in the design phase when the product owner selects a specific location in the united states to place the tower (it is important this is a named location) and talks about the overall design and requirements.   Once defined, users can select up to 20 items to bring back to their table to build the cell tower.  They must use each item during that phase.  Unused items must be returned to inventory at the end of the sprint.   At the start of each sprint users can go back and select another 20 items for that sprint. 

This game teaches the foundational processes of Scrum.  Using these techniques, teams learn to self-organize, work in a time-box environment, communicate focused on the sprint goal, plan and organize tasks, estimate quickly and precisely, measure performance and deal with unexpected events.  It is suitable for people with all levels of Agile software development experience and affords non-technical people the opportunity to step into the development (construction role) and technical people to try out the non-technical roles (scrum master and product owner).   In addition, it simulates the real world experience of dealing with the unexpected, whether it be changes in business requirements or government regulations.

After the second sprint the announcement is made that government regulations have just been formulated so that all new cell towers must now meet standards of architectural design and blend in with the surrounding community.  In addition, in order to protect birds of prey such as hawks and bald eagles,  you are required to add space for nesting birds which is away from the cell tower so that they won’t nest on the tower itself where they can cause a tower to be unmaintainable during nesting season.

Recently I had the privilege of interviewing several agile coach candidates in consideration to join my firm.  Instead of spending all of our time asking typical interview questions about past activities coaching agile teams and helping organizations transform, we asked candidates if they would be willing to coach several volunteers through a quick game of Jenga so as to see how they would perform coaching members of a simulated team.  The integration of game play into interviews for positions like agile coaches, ScrumMasters or any team member for that matter can provide valuable insights into prior experiences and assess communication abilities at a much greater level of fidelity than is yielded by typical interview questions.  The benefits of using games within interviews for coaching positions are analogous to the benefits gained by using a pair-programming session to assess both the technical skills and communication skills of software developers on agile teams.  Moreover, these valuable insights and the opportunity to experience how a coaching candidate would interact with actual team members was gained in just over 5 minutes.

Join us at AgileGames 2015 for a Jenga session where you’ll have an opportunity to experience game-based techniques for job interviews that will allow you to gather more precise information regarding candidates under consideration in less time.  During this GameJam session, participants will work in groups of 3 or 4 to go through simulated coaching interviews.  These interviews will be facilitated in a round-robin manner to allow participants to experience both what it is like to facilitate a game within a job interview as an interviewer, as well as provide an opportunity to experience what it is like to be interviewed using game-based techniques as an interviewee.

I originally presented this game at AG2012.  Since then, I have updated and expanded it to include deeper concepts around Kanban and WIP, and have applied it to product creation and product ownership.  The game is pretty simple: teams build a product system out of origami features/objects.  However, the complexity between features adds uncertainty to the product development and teams have to contend with other imposed obstacles such as process for obtaining materials. 

Also, teams learn how assumptions made deliberately or accidentally can inhibit the building of quality product in a timely manner.  In the product owner variatiion, people form product owner committees that have to discern the desires and preferences of target customers through interviews and observations so that an MVP can be developed to at least recover costs and possibly realize a profit.  "Customers" have the discretion of buying or passing on origami product that is also built by the product committee.  So, the committee not only decides what product to build, but also builds the product.

I have used the game in its variations over 100 times with successful learning obtained through "ah ha" moments and debriefing.  Planning, Daily Standup, Review and Retrospection are all covered in the simulation.  A simulation talkes a minimum of 90 minutes and can be expanded to a half day.  It is appropriate for people with beginning or intermediate knowledge.  Variations of the game can be imagined and the game modified as desired.  Materials needed are minimal with origami specfications available online or via Origami-A-Day calendars for about $14.  Origami paper is necessary at a cost of about $8 for 300 sheets.  Other materials needed include scissors, transparent tape, and Post-it type notes to create backlogs and kanban boards.

In every job that must be done,
There is an element of fun.
You find the fun and snap!
The job's a game.

- From "A Spoonful of Sugar", Mary Poppins

As an Agile Coach, I use games to demonstrate concepts to teams. Games take otherwise theoretical ideas and help teams feel them in their bones. Once they've gone through a demonstration, the air is ripe for further exploration through conversation.  Sometimes, though, you don't have the right game for the particular problem you are trying to address.  Fortunately, as Mary Poppins points out, there is fun in every job...it's just a matter of finding it. We all have experience making our own work fun, and I think that's what puts creating games in everyone's reach.  In this workshop, I'll share how I've gone about building games, and each participant will have a chance to build their own.

Note: I am calling this workshop a spoonful of sugar, not a bowlful.  While I love using longer games/workshops (like Alistair Cockburn's brilliant Elephant Carpaccio), I just can't grab the team for two-hour chunks of time all that often.  In this workshop, we'll focus on much shorter games that you can sneak in during a slow day, or in that hopeful moment just after sprint planning is completed.  These smaller games tend to isolate much simpler, smaller concepts.  I believe that a steady diet of these easy-to-digest games really helps teams incorporate the concepts in their daily work.