Agile 2010 -Part 3

Here we go about my 2nd day there. and bit of day 3 too..

In the morning I wanted to attend to some of the agile game sessions..
If you ask me why I attended to gaming sessions in such conference, I would say its due to 2 reasons..

1. We have many new recruits joining Exilesoft project organization frequently. They are coming from various project development/management environments. Getting them to agile thinking is fun but I must admit that its always challenging..Because we always have a limited time to get things going with new colleagues. So its time to learn some interesting games which helps us to get the people up to speed of agile thinking by adding more fun in to it.

2. At this time Ive realized how badly Jetlagged I am.. so it was becoming impossible for me to sit in a lecture room session.

In the whole conference I managed to attend to 2 gaming sessions. However there were too many games in this conference and made me realized how much games are integrated with agile training. One game session I attended was conducted by Michael Sahota and Gino Marckx.
Their game was about teaching strategies which will help to understand the backlog and prioritizing it.
The understanding of “must have” , “what can be negotiated” and how to fulfill stakeholder satisfaction was demonstrated by them.

The other gaming session I attended to was done by Michele Sliger at Innovation Games

In her session, each group had to volunteer to take care of a kennel during a holiday. She gave the same product backlog to each group. User stories were all about cleaning dogs, cats, brushing them, updating the database, cleaning equipments, feeding, walking dogs etc. It was a time box. We had to calculate the number of hours we have in hand to do the maximum must do ones. When we look at the backlog we understood that it was way too much hours needed. So we had to prioritize and each of us had to sign in to what we had to do during the day.

The most interesting part was the retrospective she conducted by asking everyone’s experience.. I couldn’t believe it...Some of the ladies in the class have taken this game way too serious.. they were very emotional about not having enough time to walk the dogs.. :D Some didn’t like Cats so they have refused to do the jobs related to cats.. :D I like that enthusiasm ;-)

Key“take home point” to me was that.., we need to have more games at office to get the concepts going.. That will add lots of energy to the teams.. But sure Dog Kennel is not something we see often in Sri Lanka.. ( Oops.. I hope those ladies will not read my blog.., Otherwise I will be in trouble. ) So I need to do some games wich they can relate more with their experience.. we are already planning to do one session in October.. which I will share with you for sure.
2nd day evening… .. what did I do.. Hmmm… Oh ok.. Dave arrived on Tuesday.. so we met with some friends..and we enjoyed Casino night by Rally and Reception by Version One. After that some of us had an awesome time playing dice but not cheating…




When it comes to 3rd day.. I really felt the pressure of our presentation to be done on Thursday.. and most the time I spent thinking of it and getting some points organised..talking with Dave about it... which I will explain in my next post.. Afterall this is my very first time at an Agile conference.. which made me little nervous.. but all the awsome people around me were so supportive to keep me going without getting exited..