Last year I created a short session – Learning Scrum Through Games – to help people explore the basics of Scrum in a one hour format. This year I rewrote it and took it to both Agile Tour Toronto and Ottawa.

We learned a number of interesting things from both sessions:

• Even with a poor quality Product Backlog (the Backlog I gave attendees has many issues) the team was still able to create a pretty good product.
• I don’t give the best instructions to start the exercise and yet attendees manage to create some great comics. When a real Scrum team start it’s chaotic at first. I would prefer attendees get a sense of this during the exercise so I give deliberately vague instructions.
• Ask the Product Owner Questions – in Ottawa only one team did this. As a result many teams were surprised when it turned out that a nine-page comic book was the only thing I accepted as complete
• Done or not Done – Incomplete Comics lead to a good dicussion there is no such thing as 80% done in Scrum. Working software (or comics in this case) is the only measure of progress. This topic led to a brief conversation around the importance of shippable product after every Sprint.
• Many teams jumped around the Product Backlog: choosing whichever stories they felt they could complete. They didn’t ask the Product Owner if it was OK to implement items out of order. Some teams went even further by implementing things the Product Owner didn’t ask for. Quick reminder: if the team wants to do things in a different order or do new things, they have to ask the Product Owner first.
• In Toronto several attendees remarked that it was difficult to understand what was going to happen next. In Ottawa I created an Index Card – Scrum Task wall.
• Timings – the timings in the one handout didn’t work out as well as I’d hoped. It’s not realistic to run two sprints in one hour. If you’re trying to run this yourself I recommend one and a half to two hours which will allow enough time for two Sprints and a good debrief.

Finally, when running this goal isn’t a perfectly run exercise or perfect comic book; its aim is to have people experience the chaos that is Scrum and see how it can work.

Handouts

Intro to Scrum with Games Backlog and Schedule (pdf)
Introduction to Scrum Concepts (pdf)

Slides

Caveat – the slides were just indeed as a backdrop and not stand on their own.

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