As usual, it’s time to gather again for our traditional monthly Agile Belgium Drinkup.

This one will take place at “La Becasse” behind the Bourse/Beurs (rue de Tabora 11, 1000 Bruxelles)

Some suggested that it would be nice to have a place where we could play games or even do a small presentation, and “La Becasse” has a room we can use upstairs for that.

Talking about games, we had a discussion about games that could help teams understand the importance of tests or how taking shortcuts can be a bad idea. I’ll bring a copy of “Hard Choices” with me so we can try it out. If you have other games in mind, please tell us!

We will start at 7:30 pm, a bit later, because that’s when people usually arrive.

As usual, you can register here:
http://abdup.fikket.com

Hope to see some of you there,

Marc

As usual, it’s time for our next Drinkup. It will take place on February 15th at 7 p.m. This time I’ll make sure I’m working from Brussels so I don’t get there late… Sorry again for those who had to wait last time.

It will still take place at the Estaminet du Kelderke on the Grand Place itself number 15.

Here’s a link to the website of the place.

If you want to join, please register here so we can book a suitable table.

See you there,

Now that the holidays are over, it’s time to get back to the good old habits isn’t it?

Last december, we had a retrospective of the 7 previous drinkups, you can find more about it in my last post.

This time, it’s going to be at the “Estaminet du Kelderke” on the Grand Place itself. It should be quieter, we can also eat some belgian cuisine there but the drawback is that beers are going to be more expensive than at the Delirium, I guess we’ll talk more and drink a little less

Here’s a link to the website of the place.

Wednesday 18 at 7pm, next drinkup, and as usual you can already register here.

We’ll pick a few activities in the list we gathered during the retrospective and see how we can make the other initiatives for the community to move forward.

See you on Wednesday!

You probably know that two weeks ago, before the holidays, we had a small retrospective about the drinkups from 2011. I grouped them in categories.

Feedback about the place

- Find a quieter place
- A place we can eat as well

I’m looking around for places like that close to the Grand Place of Brussels that are not too crowded. If you have any suggestion please contact me or post a comment.

We talked about sessions that we could do for some drinkups. The goal is not to do an XP user group meeting, we already have that, and the drinkup should stay different with an informal fashion around it, but we could have some small sessions now and then.

Sessions we could do during the drinkups

- Speed problem dating (I have a problem, how would you solve it? Each person gives a quick answer, no discussion, thank you!, next!)
- a DIY session (something with a construction kit, maybe some lego serious play)
- Have a small 5 minutes skype call with an “Agile star”
- Sharing conference experience
- 300 seconds talk
- Small demo of an agile technique, dev or coaching skill
- Bring/share a book (bring a book you liked, lend it to someone)
- A psychiatrist couch session
- Have some Agile stars that are in Belgium from time to time to join us

Some games we could play

- Explain Agile to the barman
- Speaker wolves

Other things related to the drinkup

- Blog about the drinkups

There were also some things not directly related to the drinkups themselves.

- Organize an Agile Belgium book club
- Organize Agile Belgium lunches with people working in the same area
- Organize an Agile Belgium picnic during the summer

So here’s the raw content of the retrospective, if you weren’t there and you want to add anything more or react to any items, feel free to send an email to the mailing list or comment here.

I can also announce that the next Agile Belgium Drinkup will take place on the 18th of January. I’m still not convinced about the places I found so I’ll keep looking. I’ll post a new event on the website and here as soon as possible.

Again, all the best for 2012, see you at the next Drinkup!

This is an informal meetup of the Belgian Agile and Lean community. Come after work and meet people you usually only meet at conferences. Anyone interested in Agile or Lean can join.

Date:

December 14, 2011 from 19:00 until… you decide to go home.

You can find us at the back of the ground floor, the tap bar. When you are in the bar go as far as you can go at the back, you’ll find us there. It’s quieter there.

The next one is a bit special as it’s the last one of 2011. It might be a good idea to retrospect on the previous editions and take decisions for 2012. So if you want to participate to the retrospective or if you just want to have a beer and talk Agile with some peers then join us!

Add your name to the list to attend.

Location:

Delirium Café
Impasse de la Fidélité 4A
1000 Bruxelles

Near Brussels Central station and the Grand’ Place.

See you there!

The conference is now completely sold out. Hope to see you at the next “Mini XP Day”.

Would you like to get an impression of the conference? Watch the video from XP Days Benelux 2010.

This is an informal meetup of the Belgian Agile and Lean community. Come after work and meet people you usually only meet at conferences. Anyone interested in Agile or Lean can join.

Date:

November 9, 2011 from 19:00 until… you decide to go home.

You can find us at the back of the ground floor, the tap bar. When you are in the bar go as far as you can go at the back, you’ll find us there. It’s quieter there.

Add your name to the list to attend.

Location:

Delirium Café
Impasse de la Fidélité 4A
1000 Bruxelles

Near Brussels Central station and the Grand’ Place.

See you there!

Topic:

This is an informal meetup of the Belgian Agile and Lean community. Come after work and meet people you usually only meet at conferences. Anyone interested in Agile or Lean can join.

Date: October 12th, 2011 from 19:00 until… you decide to go home.

You can find us at the back of the ground floor, the tap bar.

Add your name to the list to attend.

Location:

Delirium Café
Impasse de la Fidélité 4A
1000 Bruxelles

Near Brussels Central station and the Grand’ Place.

See you there!

Last week I went to Berlin for the very first Agile Lean Europe conference.

ALE2011 was one of the many ideas that originated during the World Café session hosted by Jurgen Appelo during XP2011 in Madrid.  As I’m a lazy fellow, I suggest you read the history of ALE2011 in this blogpost from Olaf Lewitz, instead of me writing it down.

I was involved in the organisation of ALE2011 on the community sofa, and I can assure you this was a crazy adventure.  Planning a conference with more than 40 organizers can be quite chaotic!  But thanks to some natural leaders like Olaf & Marcin the chaos evolved into self organisation.  They shared their experience of organizing it during the conference in a session.

On Tuesday evening I flew to Berlin after a day of work at my client’s office.  When I met the other participants in the hotel bar, I could already feel that this conference was going to be special.  There was excitement in the air.  Something new was going to happen!  I also understood the success of eXtreme Tuesday Club, when UK agilists explained me that this was exactly the format of XTC.  Having a good time together in a bar, drinking a beer and sharing stories.  This is why I believe the Agile Belgium Drinkups have a good future ahead of them.

On Wednesday morning, the conference officially started with a warmup session by John Jagger.  He involved the entire audience in his cyber dojo, which was quite an achievement, knowing that there were more than 200 people in the room!

Next was a keynote by Rachel Davies. I really like her style. Very down to earth and honest.  One message she brought was that Enterprise Agility may not be possible at all, a statement that I hear more often popping up in the community.  It was strengthened later in the conference by Brian Marick during his lighting talk, stating that we ‘Europeans’ can choose to quit these big enterprises and start up a business of our own.  Especially since we have a healthcare system

In the afternoon Open Space, I proposed a session about healthy KPI’s, a problem I’ve been struggling with at clients.  Adopting agile is fine, but do we just keep our old KPI’s?  I feel that in most organisations theser are no longer suited and trigger the wrong behaviour.  We experimented a little bit with using trends instead of single point measurements, but without a good feeling.  On the last day, Dave Snowden reassured us during his keynote that KPI’s are not useful and should be left aside.  Maybe that’s a little harsh.  I’d prefer what Bjarte Bogsnes said during his keynote about Beyond Budgeting.  A KPI should start from a goal and be revised constantly.  I will experiment with this in detail to figure this out.

On Thursday evening we had a dinner with strangers. The concept goes as follows:

• The organization reserved places in several restaurants across Berlin.
• You sign up for a restaurant and have dinner with people you haven’t met before.

I went to a Spanish restaurant with 6 other conference attendants and had a great time eating tapas and chatting late in the evening. (watch the sparkle in our eyes!)

This proved to be a great way to meet new people.  It should be part of every conference!

Friday started again with some sessions and an open space.  After lunch we listened to some more lighting talks and did a conference retrospective.  Ken Power did a great job facilitating.  I was quite honored that he used one of the exercises of my blog, called retrospective starfish.

The event was closed by a keynote from Dave Snowden and a thanks to all organizers.

In the evening I flew home with Yves Hanoulle, who made the trip much more enjoyable by being quite the storyteller.

I didn’t get to see much of the city, because I didn’t want to miss a second of the conference.  Here’s a picture of ‘Checkpoint Charlie’, the one place I visited in Berlin.

The ALE conference had a great first edition.  I’m looking forward to next year.  Who knows, maybe it will be held in Brussels!

Second Abdup July 13

Second Agile Belgium Drinkup gathered 7 people from different horizons. Developers and Coaches. We exchanged some of our concerns and experiences on how to bring Agile practices into the day to day life of a freelance developer. We had an interesting discussion about ways to make a customer understand that he won’t necessarily need everything from it’s backlog to launch a project.

Alain Ravet suggested to use belgian comics for that purpose. He uses a story from “Le petit Spirou” or “De kleine Robbe” where his mother asks him to choose some teddy bears he could give away to poor children. Of course he says he wants to keep them all, that they are all important to him. His mother then asks him which one he would grab if the house was on fire and he could only take one with him. And she goes on and on, making him imagining all kinds of situations until there are two piles of teddy bears, the ones he really likes and the ones he doesn’t really need. Here’s a picture of it, in french, if anyone has it in dutch, I guess it’s ok to post it in the comments.

If you want to read the full comic, it’s in album 7 Demande à ton père/Vraag dat aan je papa!

Of course it might be awkward to show that comic strip to customers, but it is a nice starting point if you are looking for inspiration for a small workshop a talk or whatever…

Third Abdup August 17

Another holiday Agile Belgium Drinkup, gathering 4 people this time. We forgot to send an email to the mailing list, which didn’t help. But still, again, interesting things happened.

We raised the tricky question. If you are new in the community or a newly graduated student that would like to apply in a company being Agile, or if you are more experienced and are looking for a job related to Agile, in which company do you actually apply? Should there be someone writing down a list of Agile companies in Belgium? Not really.

So what can we do then? There was a suggestion from Pascal to add some job board to the actual Agile Belgium blog. Companies that really want to find some Agile aware profiles would pay a fair amount to have their offer published on the Agile Belgium job board. Of course this is just an idea, and we need to know if some companies would be interested, and at what price.

So, taking actions! Pascal volunteered to write an email explaining the idea. Email that we would send to companies in Belgium that are related to Agile in any ways. We’ll engage in further development if there are companies interested. If you want to help, we are trying to build a long list of companies that are or might be interested in Agile, if you know such companies, drop us an email.

When is the next Agile Belgium Drinkup?

The fourth Agile Belgium Drinkup will happen on the 14th of September, still at the Delirium Café at 7 p.m. You can already register here http://abdup.fikket.com/ we hope to see you there.

See you next time!

Thanks to that drinkup, we had the opportunity to discover new faces, people we hadn’t seen before, either at conferences or other user group meetings. It didn’t take so many beers for Xavier to put post-its on the bar and facilitate a small improvised retrospective about this first drinkup.
Here are the insights and actions we have generated:

Every participant commits to try bringing someone who wasn’t at the first drinkup

For those who were there, don’t forget to convince a fellow agilist to come with you next time!

Merge the belgian community website domains

It has already been taken care of by Pascal. If you go to http://agilebelgium.org you will be redirected to http://xp.be, which will now be the one and only Agile Belgium community website.

Write a blogpost about the last drinkup

I think this is also being covered…

Find a venue with cheaper beers

The foodsquare was a nice place but the beers were a little expensive. A venue with cheaper beers and still close to major train stations would be appreciated.

Keep doing it in Brussels

Brussels is approximatively 1h or less by train from every major Belgian city, it seems like a good choice for a drinkup.

Organize next drinkup

Well, let’s take care of that right now! We decided to do these drinkups every second Wednesday of the month, it means the next one will be on the 13th of July. We will do it in the back room of the Delirium café near the Grand Place. Again, there is a fikket page so that we get an idea of the number of people that might show up:

http://abdup.fikket.com/

This is where all the drinkup events will be announced from now on.

As you can see we didn’t only drink beers. Following everything that emerged from this first edition of the Agile Belgium drinkup we can consider it to be a success. Next time, we hope you’ll join us!

The Agile Lean Europe (ALE) network is a pan-European open network for people passionate about Agile and Lean practice and thinking.

We’re organising the ALE 2011 unconference which will happen from September 7-9 in Berlin.  And we would love you to come!

Our goal is to create a European melting pot of Agile and Lean practitioners with many diverse perspectives and influences.  It is intended as a cross-border, non-profit collaboration event for mutual learning and continuous improvement. We want you to participate!

We are reaching out to the European Agile & Lean communities to come and join us during these 3 days of learning and cross-pollination.

We break the habit!  Diversity is key!

• We mix a traditional program with open space sessions, lightning talks and keynotes.
• We invite you to bring your families, there will be a spouse and kids program!
• We explicitly invite alien speakers who do not work in the software development domain.
• We want the whole of Europe to join. We already have pre-registrations by people from 28 European countries.

How can you help?

Forward this invitation to your community members and ask if they’re interested to submit a talk and register as a participant.

How does your community benefit from sending representatives to ALE 2011?

• You get a chance to pick up new ideas which you can spread in your community afterwards.
• You get to meet a lot of interesting people which you can invite to your community events.
• Your community gets visibility in the European Agile & Lean network.
• You get a clearer view on the state of Agile & Lean across Europe.

You can find more information about ALE 2011 on our website or by following #ale2011 on Twitter.

In addition to the conference, we’re also starting some ALE Network initiatives.  One is creating a system which allows communities to invite speakers when they happen to visit their region.  You can find out more about other initiatives at the conference or on our ALE Network website.

We’re counting on you to help Europe take a next step in the world of Agile & Lean!

Topic:

This is an informal meetup of the Belgian Agile and Lean community. Come after work and meet people you usually only meet at conferences. Anyone interested in Agile or Lean can join.

Add your name to the list to attend.

Location:

Foodsquare
Rue du Marché aux Herbes 120
1000 Bruxelles

Between Brussels Central station and the Grand’ Place.

See you there!

Mechelen, December 1st – 2nd 2011

XP Day Benelux is an international conference about Agile methods, intended for people from all walks of life who are involved with IT. It provides a good opportunity for exchanging ideas and sharing experiences and is suited for both experienced participants and beginners in Agile methods. The focus of this conference is on practical knowledge, real-world experience, and active participation of everyone.

XP Days Benelux 2011 will have something for everyone. Sessions for people who are new to Agile, sessions for experienced people, a good mix of technical, experience, management and process sessions. We’ll have sessions on Agile in real life, stories of success and horror, hands on workshops, and sessions that will completely surprise you!

You can be a contributor too

We’re looking for enthusiastic people who want to lead these sessions. People who work in any role, business or form. People who are willing to share, and are prepared to learn. Reflective practitioners who are not only interested in quality work but also want to know why things work as they do.

Are you new to presenting? Do you have a nice idea, but you don’t know how to shape it into a session? Don’t worry, we will offer lots of ways to help you:

• We have coaches who can help you create your session.
• Through our session proposal system you will get feedback that will help you shape your session
• We provide opportunities before the conference to try out your session.
• We have a set of personas to give you some idea of the type of participants you’ll meet at XP Days.

Have you presented sessions before? The extensive feedback will give you an opportunity to improve your session further. And you can use your experience to help other presenters to improve their session.

How to propose a session for XP Days

Becoming an XP Days presenter is simple (but not easy):

1. Submit a session idea (until July 9th, 2011)
2. You’ll receive a login to our session improvement tool
3. You complete your proposal and improve it with the feedback you receive (until August 27th, 2011)
4. You give feedback on other proposals to help their presenters to create the best proposal they can
5. Early September, the program committee selects the sessions for the program based on the following criteria:
   • Quality of the session
   • A balance of session subjects and formats
   • Participation of the presenter in the improvement process
   • Votes from everybody who proposed a session

Important dates

• Now to July 9th, 2011: submit session proposals
• Now to August 27th, 2011: improve session proposals
• September 12th, program committee meeting
• September 19th, program decided

Propose a session now to get as much time as possible to get feedback and improve your session.

See you at the conference!

See you on April 1st in Mechelen.

The call for sessions for XP Days Benelux 2011 will be announced at the conference. Start thinking about your great session ideas.

See you on the program of XP Days!

The “XP Game” is a simulation game which allows the customers and developers to experience how product features are estimated, negotiated, planned implemented and tracked in an XP project.

The Business Value Game

The Business Value Game is a fun simulation that allows you to experiment with different ways of managing your project portfolio, estimating business value, prioritising projects and evaluating the ROI of process improvement. Explore the business side of Agile.

More Learning Games

You can find more games at the Agile Coach and Tasty Cupcakes sites.

Join the Agile Games discussion group.

“Agile Fixed Price Projects“ by Pascal Van Cauwenberghe

A two-part article that describes how you can introduce agile techniques into “fixed price” contracts to increase your chances of success and customer happiness.

“The XP Game explained“, by Vera Peeters and Pascal Van Cauwenberghe This chapter from Extreme Programming Perspectives explains more about the reasoning behind the different elements of the XP Game. “Refactoring or upfront design?“, by Pascal Van Cauwenberghe This chapter from Extreme Programming Perspectives is an update of the paper presented at XP 2001 conference.

“Rock Climbing and Extreme Programming“ by Ye Yongqing.
The author discovers that most of the ideas of extreme programming are quite suitable to rock climbing.

“Simple design and unit testing with Enterprise Javabeans: the Box Metaphor“ by Vera Peeters. Presented at XP2001.
A metaphor to guide you in designing simple, consistent and testable EJB systems.

“A great challenge: XP in a typical dot-com“ by Ye Yonqing and Winston Wolff. Presented at XP2001.
This paper describes the implementation of XP in a young, dynamic, growing global web bank and an environment with rapid changing user requirements.

Books

The Systems Thinking wiki has a list of books on XP, Agile software development, teams, people, Theory of Constraints, Lean Thinking… Enough interesting material there to keep you occupied for years!

Are you interested in agile software development methodologies, like Extreme Programming, Scrum, Lean Development, FDD, Crystal, Kanban….?

All agile methodologies have some common principles and values, with an emphasis on individuals, interactions, delivery of working software, collaboration, responding to change and reflection. The different characteristics of the methods make them suitable for different circumstances.

The user group is here to share experiences with you, teach new useful techniques and to support everyone who wants to improve their software development processes. Come to our user group meetings and events to meet other people who use agile methods, or want to use it or just want to know what it really is. Or join the discussion in the Agile Belgium mailing list.

Agile Games

Games are a fun and powerful way to learn. You can download the XP Game (experience 3 iterations in an Agile team) and the Business Value Game (experience the role of Product Manager of an Agile team) from this site.

• European Summer School on Agile Programming (ESSAP) (Varese, IT)
• Noordelijke Agile Groep (Heerenveen – NL),
• Benelux XPDay 2005 (Rotterdam – NL),
• XP2005 (Sheffield – UK),
• Agile Open 2005 (Mechelen – BE),
• German XPDay 2004 (Karlsruhe – DE),
• London XPDay 2004 (London – UK),
• Belgian XP Meeting (Haasrode – BE),
• xp2004 (Garmisch-Partenkirchen – DE),
• London XPDay 2003 (London – UK),
• OT2002 (Oxford – UK),
• XP Universe 2001 (Raleigh – USA),
• XP2001 (Cagliari – IT),
• Dutch XP User Group Meeting (Amersfoort – NL).

XPUniverse

The XP-game was played at XPUniverse 2001, a conference for learning and sharing about agile software development processes, in Raleigh, North Carolina, from 23 to 25 July 2001.

Don Wells, Program Chair of the XPUniverse conference: “I played the XP Game at XP Universe. It was fun, which is a major benefit, and it accurately portrays how iteration planning works in Extreme Programming. It is different from the traditional Extreme Hour. First, it allows all the people involved to experience iteration planning from the point of view of both customer and developer. This makes it very suitable for use with groups of customers, developers or any mixture of both. Second, it has the user stories created in advance in a well defined and easy to understand and perform way. This shifts the focus of the game to planning and how that works within XP. This is a great way to introduce iteration planning XP style.”

XP2001

The XP-game featured on the agenda of XP2001, the Extreme Programming’s annual conference in Cagliari, Italy, from 20 to 23 May 2001.

Michele Marchesi, Program Chair of the conference: “The XP game was an exciting experience. It is fun and you can understand how the Planning Game of XP works. My only suggestion is to divide players in developers (who estimate the stories and “implement” them) and users (who choose the stories to implement), since the division of tasks among users and developers is of paramount importance in XP. In any case, it was a pleasant and interesting experience, which should be played in every XP course.”

Ron Jeffries: “I played the XP game at XP2001. It’s a lot of fun and gives a fair sense of how XP goes. But the coach wouldn’t let us work even one second of overtime, which is too Extreme for me, and cost us the game. And he wouldn’t let us do spikes, either, which caused us to try to build a house of cards, thinking we actually had a chance. But the best part was the balloons!”

Philips

Philips approached Vera Peeters and Pascal Van Cauwenberghe to present the XP-game at the Philips Software Conference 2001, attended by 530 Philips staff members in Eindhoven, the Netherlands on 8 and 9 February 2001. Philips staff-members who played the XP-game, responded enthusiastically.

Erik Bos, who organised the XP-game session for Philips, comments: “The participants developed a clear understanding of XP. Also, we had a lot of fun doing this hands-on game!”

SERC

The game also featured at SERC, the Software Engineering Research Centre, based in Utrecht, the Netherlands. SERC was founded in 1987 as a knowledge centre to improve software engineering in the Netherlands.

Erik Groeneveld, SERC advisor, testifies: “We have played the game several times in different circumstances. It turns out to be an effective instrument to teach people the XP planning process.”

If you’ve published a blog entry or pictures about the games we’d love to link to your site.

DOWNLOAD The XP Game v5.0

The package contains a detailed manual and a ready-to-print set of cards and score-sheets. Total size of the ZIPped file is about 2.8MB.

Everything you need is in the download, just add balloons, cards, dice, hourglasses, pens, fun and some people who want to learn and have fun.

“The XP Game explained“, a chapter from Extreme Programming Perspectives, explains more about the reasoning behind the different elements of the XP Game. This text is now included in the XP Game download package.

The XP Game by Vera Peeters and Pascal Van Cauwenberghe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Belgium License.

Hope you enjoy it!

We would appreciate it if you would fill out the evaluation form after you’ve played it. It will help us to improve the game.

At this point, you can ask the participants some questions to reflect on what happened.

Developers estimate stories

The team receives 7 more story cards to estimate. This time, the coach must stress that the estimations be done by comparing with the cost estimates of the previously implemented stories.

Customers choose stories

The team must choose stories for a total estimated number of points equal to the team velocity.

Developers implement stories

The stories are implemented one by one, until the hourglass is empty (the fixed length of an iteration).

The stories, estimates and business value earned are added to the score sheets. The sum of the estimates of the implemented stories is the new velocity.

Further iterations can be done, each time selecting stories with the total estimate equal to the team velocity measured during the previous iteration.

Game variation

To give the game a more “real world” sense, the game master may decide at the end of an iteration that “the specifications have changed“. All stories written on cards of a certain color have no business value at all. This change retroactively applies to stories that have been implemented!

Each team receives 12 story cards. Each card contains the following:

• Story description. The stories are simple little games. No technical knowledge is required.
• Story value in “business points”. The aim of the game is to earn as much business points as possible.
• Estimate: 1/2/3/4/5/6 points or impossible

Developers estimate stories

The team estimates how long the story will take to implement. They must choose one of 1-2-3-4-5-6 points or “this is too big to estimate“. The team may ask the coach questions about the story. The coach should suggest that estimates be done by sorting and comparing stories by complexity. E.g. if a story is twice as difficult as another, estimate twice the number of points.

Customers choose stories

The team selects stories they guess they can implement in 180 seconds (the real-time length of the iteration). The team must maximize the number of business points to earn by implementing the stories.

The team orders the stories for implementation. All the stories must be “implemented” sequentially in this order.

Developers implement stories

The stories are taken one by one. Team members volunteer to implement the story. Before implementation, the team may hold a short discussion on how best to implement the story. The team may ask the coach questions about implementation and acceptance conditions.

When a developer starts the implementation of a story the hourglass is started. The hourglass is stopped when the story is finished and accepted by the coach. The business points of the story are earned.

The iteration continues until the hourglass is empty. If all the selected stories have been implemented before that happens, the team may select more stories for implementation.

At the end of the iteration, the score sheet contains the stories, estimated time and business points earned. The business points are summed. The sum of the cost points of the implemented stories is the velocity.

Aims

• Let developers and customers experience both sides of the planning game
• Explain velocity
• Show how you can quickly learn to make predictable plans

Players

• Teams of 5-8 technical and non-technical people
• 1 coach per team, to answer questions, explain rules, keep scores. Coaches should be familiar with the concept of velocity.
• 1 game master to explain and lead the game.

Every member of the audience will participate as a teammember.

Props

• Pre-filled story cards
• Slide presentation explaining the steps, aims and meaning of the game
• Planning and scoring sheets, pencil
• Playing cards, dice, balloons, other small props to perform stories.
• Hourglass per team

Outline

In real life Planning Game, development and business people are sitting on opposite sides of the table. Both participate, but in different roles. The XP Game makes the players switch between developer and customer roles, so that they understand each other’s behaviour very well.

Some of the concepts in the Planning Game are difficult to grasp, for developers and for customers. This XP Game is a practical way to demonstrate how the rules of the XP Planning Game make up an environment in which it becomes possible to make predictable plans. After all, the easiest way to get a feeling for the way it works is to experience it.

It differs from the classical Mousetrap or Coffeemaker Game in several ways:

• The developers and the customers are not separated. Everybody get to play the developer and customer role.
• The stories are really very simply, everybody will understand them,
• but they’re also very concrete.
• We do a real implementation, with real, unambiguous acceptance tests,
• but not a bit technical!!! (I guess everybody can inflate a balloon…)
• There’s a small element of competition in it that makes it a really fun game to play.

Addressed concepts: velocity, planning game, estimation, and how to explain these concepts in a clear way to all participants in the XP process.

Detailed description

• Game props
• First iteration
• Second iteration
• Game ending

You should attend because…

• You can hear about new techniques
• You can hear how other companies apply techniques
• You can meet other people who are interested in improving the way they work
• You can share experience with people who’ve been using Agile methods for anything between 0 and 10 years (and some people who have been applying Agile, before “Agile” existed )
• You can tryout a session you want to run at a conference
• You can attend conference sessions for free

You should host a meeting because…

• You want to let your employees learn more about Agile
• You want a session about a certain topic that will benefit your company
• You want to find people who have Agile experience
• You get 20-30 Agile consultants to help you with a topic and it costs nothing more than some food and drinks

If you want to host a meeting

Contact us and we’ll work with you to create a user group meeting that benefits your company. All you have to do is choose an interesting topic and provide a room, some food and drinks for the participants.

How do you prioritize your features and stories?

Agile teams want to deliver maximum business value. That’s easy if the Onsite Customer assigns business value to each story. But how does the Customer do that? How can you estimate business value?

How do you decide between stories? How do you decide between projects? How do you decide between clients?

This game gives you some simple business value estimation techniques that are “good enough” for everyday use.

Teams of ‘businesspeople’ have to make plans for their development team. The goal of the game is to earn as much money as possible. This game is a complement to the XP Game: how do these ‘business value points” on the XP Game story cards get chosen?

We provide the clients and their wishes. We suggest the techniques to estimate business value.

The rest is up to you.

Want to play the game?

NEW: version 2.0

• Download the game instructions and materials in English (approx 3 Mb)
• Download the game instructions and materials in French (approx 3 Mb)
• New: Download the game instructions and materials in Spanish (approx 4 Mb)

Changes from previous version:

• More Requests
• Clarified score sheet
• More process improvement options
• Pictures for accountant and development team

Thank you to:

• Portia Tung for help in designing and testing the game
• Laurent Morisseau for help with the French translation
• Juan Gutiérrez Plaza for translating the game into Spanish. Thanks to Leo Antolí and Thomas Wallet for reviewing this translation

Version 1.1

Download the game instructions and materials (approx 3.5 Mb)

Client pictures made with “South Park Studio” by Janina Köppel