How to Build an Agile Team for Your Software Development Project

AlexQin

Team-Building Activities for a More Agile Team

Games are fun and they are very effective for team building. Here are some examples of the games that are quite short, but very effective. Let’s look at the most famous ones:

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Buy a Feature

This game teaches feature prioritization and it takes around 15 minutes to play. The optimal number of people for groups is three to eight. Each player receives two items: a handout with a menu of features and their prices, and a sum of play money.

Features can be anything, for example: items to have on a vacation. The sum total of all players’ money should be less than the total of all feature prices. This introduces scarcity and forces the team to make trade-offs, because it’s not possible to purchase all items on the list.

Players take turns using their individual sums of money to pay for features they find most valuable. Once players have spent most of their funds, and either they don’t have enough individually to make another purchase or they don’t value what’s left on the menu to buy anything else, the group will pool the remaining funds and discuss what to buy from the remaining items. This game helps team members to learn how to prioritize user stories and how to do resource management.

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The White Elephant Sizing

In all software projects, Agile teams need to estimate user stories as well as product backlog. And this game is fantastic to learn how to estimate user stories. In this Agile game, players have 50 user stories and have four hours to estimate them. Everyone’s voices are heard, and everyone contributes equally.

The goal of this game is to get a quick estimate of the size of an Agile project and the size of the individual stories before the project starts. I believe this game is absolutely a must, as most Agile teams have issues with estimating their projects in terms of time.

AlexQin

Battleships

This Agile game is generally used to introduce people to iterative development and to explain the concepts behind it. The idea is to get people to understand that up-front, large plans are just not a good idea!

In this game, you have two teams: A and B. Each will have a “battleships sheet” and some dots. Each team will have around two minutes to plan how they would like to place their ships. Team A will have five minutes to plan its hits up front and will mark them on their sheet, and will then communicate them to Team B, which will tell Team A which ships sunk, hits that missed, etc. Team B then also gets five minutes to play each one of their hits, but this time with real-time feedback from Team A on misses, hits, and ships that sunk.

Results are obvious. Team B gets the chance to change its plans due to the fact that they follow iterative rules, which will make them score higher. It seems obvious in this game; however, many teams forget it when they work on real projects.

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The Ball Point Game

This game helps a lot when introducing Scrum to new Agile teams. It helps to estimate user stories, sprint, and the project overall.

The rules are simple: You need to give the team as many balls as possible in two minutes. Each ball has to pass by each team member. In order to get a point, it’s important that the first person who gets the ball be the last one to touch it. So the team will get five iterations, and before each one, it has to estimate how many balls they believe will be passed. Then, the actual number is recorded at the end of each iteration and is compared with the estimations given by the team.

Often, at the first iteration, it is very difficult to give an estimation, as the team doesn’t really know how long it may take to get one ball through the whole team. But, after each iteration, there are retrospectives, and therefore the team adapts the process. With each iteration, normally, the results become better and better. This game helps Agile teams work together and learn how to make estimations, taking into account not only personal capabilities, but also capabilities of the team as a whole. Also, it helps to understand the need for iterative progress and development.

AlexQin

good job