Agile Games Collection

This game helps participants experience firsthand how agile requirements differ from traditional, task-based requirements. It demonstrates why a simple list of tasks isn’t enough to guide a team effectively and how providing context empowers teams to make better decisions.

Learning Objectives:

• Understand the Importance of Context: See how knowing the “who,” “what,” and “why” leads to better outcomes.
• Experience Outcome Over Output: Recognize that focusing on desired outcomes rather than just completing tasks results in higher-quality products.
• Empower Teams: Feel how giving teams the autonomy to decide “how” enhances creativity and engagement.
• Reflect on Current Practices: Trigger discussions about how requirements are handled in your organization and how they can be improved.

The Ball Point Game has two main goals:

1. To learn about iterative development and the power of continuous improvement.
2. To start grasping key concepts of the Scrum framework.

Learning Objectives

• Understand the importance of continuous improvement.
• Experience working in iterations.
• Learn about estimation based on empirical data (yesterday’s weather) and the concept of velocity.
• Get introduced to Scrum concepts like sprints, retrospectives, and planning.
• Recognize what sustainable pace feels like.

This game is all about experiencing firsthand why face-to-face communication beats written communication—one of the core agile principles. It lets participants feel why, for example, the Product Owner in a Scrum team should be part of the team and chat with developers frequently.

Learning Objectives:

• Understand that face-to-face communication is superior to the typical written communication used in organizations, especially in requirements engineering.
• Realize that writing and reading take longer, are more tedious, and often produce worse results.
• Experience how direct face-to-face communication is faster, more enjoyable, less stressful, and leads to better products.
• Understand that the Product Owner or Product Manager should not write long user stories but rather communicate with developers every day.
• Learn that user stories are about collaboration; the written part is just a reminder for a conversation.

This game creates a powerful, hands-on experience of why transparency, shared goals, collaboration, and challenging processes are crucial in an agile environment (or any organization, really!). By collecting tokens under time pressure, participants discover firsthand how hidden goals and assumptions lead to conflict, while openness and creative thinking lead to better collective outcomes.

Learning Objectives:

• Transparency: Understand the impact of sharing vs. hiding goals.
• Shared Goals: Experience how collaborating toward a common objective benefits everyone.
• Systems Thinking: Realize the pitfalls of optimizing for a single team versus optimizing the entire system.
• Challenging the Process: Learn to question assumed constraints—like immovable circles—to spark innovation.
• Collaboration vs. Competition: See how a “zero-sum” mindset can hamper organizational success.

This game is a Scrum simulation that lets
participants dive into all Scrum events and roles. It’s a hands-on way to put theory into practice and see how everything fits together.

Learning Objectives:

• Try out Scrum theory in practice: Experience the Scrum framework in a fun, interactive way.
• Experience the interplay of Developers, Scrum Master, and Product Owner: Understand how each role contributes to the team’s success.
• Go through Sprint Planning, Sprint, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review, and Sprint Retrospective: Participate in all Scrum events within a condensed time frame.
• Trigger questions about Scrum: Encourage participants to ask questions that arise from actually putting training theory into practice.