How to play Agile Poker
We had a situation where we were experiencing a bottleneck
in our Agile process at the point of the Quality Assurance checks. A part of
the problem was a lack of manpower at QA, but a larger part was the developers
and the fact that they may not have had enough information to properly address
the story.
So I need a mechanism whereby the individual developer would
be encouraged to ask more questions and communicate a little more closely with
product owners and other stake holders to make sure they were addressing the
request with a more targeted effort.
I addressed this as a management issue.
How can I get the development team to feel it is OK to ask
questions, gather information about the task at hand before writing or
adjusting code? How can I get the product owners to provide better stories in
their requests so the developer would have enough information right out of the
gate?
My answer was Agile Poker.
Now you can’t do this with every sprint otherwise it gets
boring; detracts from the novelty.
First, obtain some wooden nickels. They are inexpensive and
you can customize them with a team name, product name and release info.
Designed right you can give them to the folks in marketing (opps, business
development) afterwards they can use at trade shows and stuff like that.
Anyway, for every sprint task a developer completes and promotes
to the Peer Review they get one token. You can also work out the token values
on the front end, i.e. more time for task the more tokens it is worth.
If the task fails the peer review or QA checks they lose
their tokens.
The developer with the most tokens as the end of the sprint
wins.
The prize can be a crisp hundred dollar bill or a gift card
or a years’ worth of Netflix or something – the prize could even be something
the team picks prior to the sprint.
Anyway….
I’m Jim Harris – let me know if your team uses something
like this.
In my position as Vice
President of Product Development at Lawtrac, a position I held for nearly
fifteen years, I oversaw the desktop and mobile development teams, quality
assurance team and worked directly with clients to ensure every release or
update contained the advancements they desired.
I have handled vary large
software implementations which included data conversions and training.
As the VP of Product
Development I helped add value to the company which was sold at the end of
2014. During my tenure I transformed my entire staff to the Agile methodology
of production and personally obtained my Certified Scrum Master standing as I
am a lead-by-example manager. I have been three-times published by OWASP and
have spoken at national events by Adobe and Legal Technologies Association on
developing secure applications. I bring experience, confidence, and
self-discipline; together we can accomplish anything.
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