Agile: Practical exercise

Start is a point where our brain accepts something or reject, or at least puts on the skeptic shelf.  So, a good start is always important. Agile methodology usually falls in reject set with people with waterfall thinking or who never *really* tried it. Why?..., I'm going to discuss to in this article, also how we can fix it by doing a practical exercise for introducing practical side of Agile to new comers.

I saw many times when people agree with agile statements, but some silent feelings are left that it will not work from practical perspective. As result the agile theory remains as a ‘famous' theory which is forgotten in time and space. Theory and Practice are percept in different ways, theory can be understood but it doesn't allow feeling the subject, and doesn't matter it is management Agile such as SCRUM or development Agile such as XP.

Randal L Schwartz quoted: The difference between theory and practice in theory is much less than the difference between theory and practice in practice.

 In case of agile feeling emotional and practical part of the methodology is critical for its adaptation. In water fall methodologies the psychological part is less important because they are usually driven by bureaucracy, where any person can be replaced (even in waterfall is not true, it is just a try to reduce it), and so on...     

There are many great resources with agile theory, even theory about practice; I don't want to list them here now. Here I want to make public already tested game which is a simple game that introduces people to Agile and SCRUM.  The game allows feeling practical side of agile to agile new comers and allow to understand agile as from inside and not from words of a person who did it.  It is important difference. The game is called ‘Air Plane Factory', the game consist in creating a line of production of paper airplanes in agile iterative manner.

Here are more details http://www.agileway.com.br/2009/11/16/the-airplane-factory-game/.

I've just tried to apply the game in our company with a group of ~12 persons divided in three teams. The result was only positive one: fun, great team work, communication, iterative PDCA (plan-do-check-act), visible improvement over iterations, transparency... and simple from process perspective. All these finalized with a great retrospective of agile benefits and values and applied during the game.

Here is how it looks like:

1. Iteration's Planing Meeting

2. Iternation's implementation phase

3. Acceptance Testing at the end of the iteration

From my perspective, one advantage of the game over the real agile project is that the game shows on a smaller scale the entire agile process, making agile benefits and values more obvious.

Thanks to game creators for sharing it to the community and team which accepted to participate.

Thank you,

Artur Trosin