Let s Play

Let's Play!

The players are divided into small teams (four to eight players). Each team consists of developers and customers. A coach assists each team, to explain and guide the game and to answer questions. The team can earn "business points" by performing simple tasks. The team with the most business points wins.

The coach gives the team a small set of prewritten story cards. These cards describe simple tasks, such as "Build a two-story house of cards," "Throw a six five times using two dice," and "Find a missing card from a pack of cards."

The team members (acting as developers) estimate how long it will take them to "implement" the tasks. The coach is available to answer questions about the stories. The team may choose a time between ten and 60 seconds. Or they may declare that it's impossible to implement the task in 60 seconds. When all the stories have been estimated, the cards are handed back to the coach.

The team (now acting as a customer) must create a release plan: They choose the stories to implement and the order of implementation. Each story is worth some business points. The team tries to maximize the number of business points they can earn. The total time to implement all selected stories may not exceed 180 seconds, the fixed iteration time.

The team members (acting as developers) must now implement each planned story in turn, in the order defined by the customer. An hourglass is used to measure the implementation time. When the implementation is "accepted" by the coach, the team earns the business points of the story. When the hourglass runs out, the iteration ends. If the team has finished all the stories before the end of the iteration, they may ask the customer for another story.

At the end of each iteration, there is a debriefing, discussing the problems, solutions, and strategies. The "team velocity" is explained and calculated. For the next iteration, the team must use velocity instead of time as a measure of how much work they can do.

The simulation typically runs over three iterations. It takes from one and a half to two hours, including debriefing and discussion sessions.