One minute agiler

Following process can be boring, so let’s change it by playing games with your team dedicated for agile projects. You can find nice summary of them under http://tastycupcakes.com/index.php?title=Main_Page.

The benefits of applying games into your Sprint/Iteration are obvious:

• you increase team's morality and cooperation,
• you are doing process in more informal, funnier way,
• the whole team is involved,
• you exercise the team’s communication skill.

What needs to be done to success in playing these games? First thing is the team’s awareness of the game’s rules, all members need to follow them (there is no exception as it can disturb the game), secondly the team need to have a positive attitude and willing to try new things.

In our project, we tried "The Story of our Sprints". The whole team sat down in the circle, everyone was obligated to continue the story began by his predecessor. The general impression was quite good, we enjoyed it a lot. It was different than usual retrospective. We did something similar to the timeline by telling the story – we reminded the most important activities and facts in the iteration in the amusing way. However, some of the team member prefered the “old fashioned” retrospective – rather than saying words in the form of story, they did it without any poetical form. It wasn’t good as it had been killing spirit of game. I tried to persuade them to “build” the story but they followed their own style - I was powerless to change this. Lesson learned from this is that you can benefit from playing an agile game only if all members cooperate each another.