Zmey is a popular dragon form the Slavic mythology with three heads, wings and a snake’s body. It personifies evil and often demands tribute from villages or small towns in the form of gold. In an attempt to defeat the Zmey and relieve the people from this odious creature many legendary heroes have lost their lives. So have software engineers. But in their case the…
The Planning Quest
This exercise is a continuation of The Estimation Quest. It covers some additional aspects of software planning (incl. scoping, risk/change management and scheduling) and could be used to demonstrate some major differences between the traditional and agile software development in this regard.
The Estimation Quest
Adventure is defined as a bold, usually risky undertaking with uncertain outcome. How close is this definition to software estimation? I would say there are almost identical. The only difference is that adventure is more often exciting and enjoyable while software estimation is mainly tedious and frustrating. The main purpose of this exercise is: (1) to lead the participants through some of the most popular…
The Cultural Radars
Corporate culture is the number one barrier to agile adoption and the leading cause of failed agile projects. At least this is what VersionOne‘s surveys suggest for the last few years (e.g. 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010). This exercise aims to examine the cultural diversity (the variety in participants’ cultural preferences) and to identify possible clashes with the agile culture (based on the prevailing cultural preferences…
The Rocket Retrospective
The Rocket retrospective is a 15 minutes (strictly timeboxed) retrospective which defines concrete follow-up actions for each of its participants. Being short, engaging and result-oriented it boost up the self-actualizing/self-discovering capabilities of the team to a new level within an affordable cost (much lower than alternative retrospectives as the Start-stop-continue retrospective, Starfish retrospective, Speed boat retrospective, Timeline retrospective, etc.). Also it effectively addresses the Parkinson’s…