XP Planning day

At the XP Planning day you will learn how to make a predictable plan for a software development team. The course will start with a focus on the XP Planning Game, which is a very simple but effective way to plan. We use a simulation, where you will actively experience the way this planning technique works. We don't want to highlight this process as the one and only that will work for everyone. We use this as a model that will help you to think about different possibilities. We will spend time on reflection and discuss the problems and advantages of this technique. The excercise we use to teach the planning process is "The XP Game". This is a playful way to familiarize the participants with some of the more difficult concepts of the XP Planning Game, like velocity, story estimation, yesterday's weather and the cycle of life. Anyone can participate. The goal is to make development and business people work together in 1 team. Both will have the experience of performing the other role. It is not required that your team wants to adopt XP or SCRUM. This course is useful if that's the case, but it is also very powerful if you want to learn new and powerful ways to plan for a software development team.

Audience

Everyone that is involved in software develpment projects: developers, testers, project leaders, managers, sales people, support experts, marketing people, users.

Benefits of participating

Want to learn about...

making predictable plans? 
team planning vs individual planning?
the xp planning game?
velocity?
story estimation?
short releases?
how to explain these things in your company? 

Want to...
play the planning game? (...but maybe in another role)
feel the velocity of your team?
see it work?
let both business people and developers experience it?
have fun?

Session timeline

In real life Planning Game, development and business people are sitting on opposite sides of the table. Both participate, but in different roles. The XP Game makes the players switch between developer and customer roles, so that they understand each other's behaviour very well. 


Some of the concepts in the Planning Game are difficult to grasp, for developers and for customers. This XP Game is a practical way to demonstrate how the rules of the XP Planning Game make up an environment in which it becomes possible to make predictable plans. After all, the easiest way to get a feeling for the way it works is to experience it.


It differs from the classical Mousetrap or Coffeemaker Game in several ways:

The developers and the customers are not separated. Everybody get to play the developer and customer role.
The stories are really very simply, everybody will understand them,
but they're also very concrete.
We do a real implementation, with real, unambiguous acceptance tests,
but not a bit technical!!!
There's a small element of competition in it that makes it a really fun game to play.

History

The XP-game has been played in lots of companies and in lots of courses, but also at a number of conferences:
European Summer School on Agile Programming (ESSAP) (Varese, IT)
Noordelijke Agile Groep (Heerenveen - NL),
Benelux XPDay 2005 (Rotterdam - NL),
XP2005 (Sheffield - UK),
Agile Open 2005 (Mechelen - BE),
German XPDay 2004 (Karlsruhe - DE),
London XPDay 2004 (London - UK),
Belgian XP Meeting (Haasrode - BE),
xp2004 (Garmisch-Partenkirchen - DE),
London XPDay 2003 (London - UK),
OT2002 (Oxford - UK),
XP Universe 2001 (Raleigh - USA),
XP2001 (Cagliari - IT),
Dutch XP User Group Meeting (Amersfoort - NL).
XPUniverse
The XP-game was played at XPUniverse 2001, a conference for learning and sharing about agile software development processes, in Raleigh, North Carolina, from 23 to 25 July 2001.

Don Wells, Program Chair of the XPUniverse conference: "I played the XP Game at XP Universe. It was fun, which is a major benefit, and it accurately portrays how iteration planning works in Extreme Programming. It is different from the traditional Extreme Hour. First, it allows all the people involved to experience iteration planning from the point of view of both customer and developer. This makes it very suitable for use with groups of customers, developers or any mixture of both. Second, it has the user stories created in advance in a well defined and easy to understand and perform way. This shifts the focus of the game to planning and how that works within XP. This is a great way to introduce iteration planning XP style."



XP2001
The XP-game featured on the agenda of XP2001, the Extreme Programming's annual conference in Cagliari, Italy, from 20 to 23 May 2001.

Michele Marchesi, Program Chair of the conference: "The XP game was an exciting experience. It is fun and you can understand how the Planning Game of XP works. My only suggestion is to divide players in developers (who estimate the stories and "implement" them) and users (who choose the stories to implement), since the division of tasks among users and developers is of paramount importance in XP. In any case, it was a pleasant and interesting experience, which should be played in every XP course."



Ron Jeffries: "I played the XP game at XP2001. It's a lot of fun and gives a fair sense of how XP goes. But the coach wouldn't let us work even one second of overtime, which is too Extreme for me, and cost us the game. And he wouldn't let us do spikes, either, which caused us to try to build a house of cards, thinking we actually had a chance. But the best part was the balloons!"


Philips
Philips approached Vera Peeters and Pascal Van Cauwenberghe to present the XP-game at the Philips Software Conference 2001, attended by 530 Philips staff members in Eindhoven, the Netherlands on 8 and 9 February 2001. Philips staff-members who played the XP-game, responded enthusiastically. Erik Bos, who organised the XP-game session for Philips, comments: "The participants developed a clear understanding of XP. Also, we had a lot of fun doing this hands-on game!"


SERC
The game also featured at SERC, the Software Engineering Research Centre, based in Utrecht, the Netherlands. SERC was founded in 1987 as a knowledge centre to improve software engineering in the Netherlands. Erik Groeneveld, SERC advisor, testifies: "We have played the game several times in different circumstances. It turns out to be an effective instrument to teach people the XP planning process."

Participants

8 - 20 
 
 
Technorati tags: XP, Extreme Programming, XP game, Xp Planning, Velocity, Yesterday's weather, Software Estimation, Scrum, Planning Game