Games should be taken, well, seriously!
The 8th Agile Practitioners IL meeting took place on May 30th 2012, at SAP offices in Raanana.
Loyal to the title of the meeting, Agile Playground, we played two games highlighting agile values.
The first game was based on Alistair Cockburn’s version of James Shore’s Offing the Offsite Customer game. It is a fantastic game to experience many aspects of agility: iterative and incremental process, inspect and adapt, short feedback loops, and many more. To me, when introduced by Alistair Cockburn in the 2009 Scrum User Group, I have learned on agile requirements in less than an hour more profoundly than many other learning opportunities I have had before and after.
Judging by the discussion that followed, participants devoted themselves to the session, and I hope we succeeded to have similar influence.
In the second part, Lior Friedman facilitated several estimation techniques, including planning poker, silent sorting, and relative sorting. Not surprisingly, this exercise proved once again that absolute estimations yield vast variance between individuals and teams – up to 10 fold, compared to relative estimations that yield in majority of cases not more than one notch difference between teams.
In the video below you may see a very uncommon sight in a group of Israeli software experts: a large group of more than 30 people exercising silent sorting
We would like to thank our hosts at SAP Israel for their warm hospitality, and, of course, all participants, loyal patrons as well as newcomers for coming to the group meeting
See you in AP_IL #9
P.S
AP_IL #9 and AP_IL #10 are already planned with contributors from the community. Follow our linked in group Agile Practitioners IL to find out who is going to be there.
If you would like to share, or you would like one of our sessions to focus on a specific issue – please let us know – These meetings are all about sharing the agile culture with all of us!
Becoming agile 