The planning game is one of the more paradoxical parts of eXtreme Programming. The XP game unravels the mystery, and empowers you to start running your own planning games. When you play the XP Game, you'll get to experience the planning game (...maybe in another role), feel the velocity of your team, and see it work. The XP Game lets both business people and developers experience it.
The XP Game is a playful way to familiarize the players with velocity, story estimation, yesterdays weather and the cycle of life. Anyone can participate. This game is especially useful when a team or company starts adopting XP. The XP game has been road-tested by hundreds of people around the world. I was actively involved in testing the first and subsequent new releases of this game since 2000.
Depending on the size of the group, this tutorial is organised together in collaboration with the games' designers Vera Peeters and Pascal van Cauwenberghe, or one or more other coaches from Agile Systems Benelux. The tutorial material is open source, published on xpgame.be. After experiencing this tutorial as facilitated by others, you can effectively facilitate it yourself.
This workshop helps programmers who have already started Test Driven Development (e.g. after self-starting, or attending an Agile eXperience or Test Driven Development introduction.) to grasp consequences of more advanced testing techniques. The participants examine several code-examples to learn how to answer questions such as:
The presenters and participants share their experience, resulting in several Diagrams of Effects explaining the forces that lead developers to choose one technique over another, depending on the context in which it is applied. After this workshop, programmers can select an appropriate technique quicker and with more confidence. Managers understand short- and long-term consequences of tradeoffs developers make better. This workshop is facilitated together with Rob Westgeest or Paul Simmons.
The Agile Manifesto states: we have come to value individuals and interactions over processes and tools. Tools and techniques are not enough for running your projects, you need 'people tools' as well. We all know that for instance developers and customers fighting abouth who did what wrong doesn't make our projects finish early, yet it is hard to stop doing it. Especially when the pressure is on. This session provides tools and processes for individuals and interactions, to help you take a step towards peaceful, effective projects. The workshop is based on Virginia Satir's work. Read on to find out more about this highly experiential workshop I do with Nynke Fokma and Marc Evers.
One of the main agile values is communication. A team that communicates effectively and congruently is an order of magnitude more effective than a team that doesn't. Together with Nynke Fokma I deliver in-house communication training, adapted to skills, needs and context of the client organisation.
This half day tutorial designed by Nynke Fokma is for advanced practitioners who are prepared to experience organisational chaos and change in an experiential company simulation. Please read patient information carefully before dancing the dance of change....
This one-day tutorial introduces the Diagram of Effects (also known as Causal Loop Diagram) notation. A Diagram of Effects makes it possible to discover cause and effect relations that are separated by time, and are thus not immediately obvious. After this workshop, participants can find and communicate counter-intuitive, effective interventions.
The agile manifesto prefers responding to change over following a plan. In its most extreme form, this can degenerate into reactively developing software just for next week. We seek to create a lightweight way of longer-term planning, that allows us to make adaptive choices on a week-by-week basis.In this workshop we apply the scenario planning steps from The Art of the Long View - Planning the Future in an Uncertain World by Peter Schwartz, for moving into an anticipatory stance. This workshop is co-facilitated with Nynke Fokma or Marc Evers. See Workshop details and Scenario planning in Wikipedia for more information.
In this workshop we apply Value Stream Mapping to understand business value creation in a complete software development organisation, from requirements to delivery. After this tutorial, participants know where they can remove delays in their process to reduce time to market.
Game of Goose, an open source rule transformation game, intended to create awareness of responses of operational systems to given objectives and to strategic aim changes from executive management. A workshop from Nynke Fokma. Learn more about this fun learning experience.
In our work as software development coaches, we have noticed that changing your software development method changes your organisation. We have run into questions like: why can't the customer keep up with the programming team and what can be done about it? How can we get a team to start unit testing? Is the lack of unit testing really the team’s biggest problem? What are the underlying dynamics of adding people to a project and how can these be used to increase project velocity?
We have found that the Diagram Of Effects (also known as the Causal Loop Diagram) is a simple and powerful technique for finding answers to these questions. It is a way of seeing organisations, projects, and teams as systems consisting of interrelated and interacting parts. A Diagram of Effects focuses on relationships and on the whole, instead of focusing on the parts in isolation. It helps to identify self-reinforcing feedback loops and not-so-obvious cause-effect relations.
The goal of this workshop is to apply systems thinking as a methodology-independent tool for understanding and influencing the dynamics of software development projects, teams, and organisations. Participants will learn to apply systems thinking, and in particular the Diagram of Effects (or Causal Loop Diagrams) technique, to different situations in projects, teams, and organisations; they also have an opportunity to share experiences in a structured way.
We start with a collaborative, experiential game. After the game we show a Diagram of Effects from our own practice, so the participants get an idea how the techniques we learnt in the game translate to every-day practice. Subsequently we facilitate groups of participants in translating their own stories in a diagram and finding systemic interventions. Each group presents its results to the rest of the participants.
software developers, project leaders, coaches, customers, anybody involved in (IT) projects.
Participants are not required to have any knowledge or experience with the technique; the tutorial is also suitable for people experienced in systems thinking.
Participants know how to apply the Diagram Of Effects to software development practice, and have learnt new stories and interventions from other projects.