The agile dot game

This is an online simulation of the agile dot game

Play the game

Go to https://afternoon-bayou-75731.herokuapp.com/

Progress

see https://github.com/michelgrootjans/dot-game/projects/2

How I use it during a workshop

Introduction

Demo the simulation on a test project first. Show every person's task in the workflow.

Once the demo is over, ask the audience to estimate the average task in seconds.

The workshop

We're going to run a number of iterations:

Push Batches of 4

Process for each participant

1. Wait for a batch of 4 items to appear in their inbox
2. They take exactly 4 items in their workspace
3. They solve the 4 items
4. Move the 4 items to their outbox
5. go to 1.

Push Piece by piece

Process for each participant

1. Wait for an item to appear in their inbox
2. They take exactly 1 items in their workspace
3. They solve the item
4. Move the item to their outbox
5. go to 1.

Pull Batches of 4

Process for each participant

1. Wait for a batch of 4 items to appear in their inbox
2. They take exactly 4 items in their workspace
3. They solve the 4 items
4. They move the 4 solved items only if their outbox is empty
5. go to 1.

Pull Piece by piece

Process for each participant

1. Wait for an item to appear in their inbox
2. They take exactly 1 items in their workspace
3. They solve the item
4. Move the item to their outbox only if the outbox is empty
5. go to 1.

Limit total WIP

The Product owner creating the items cannot go over a total WIP of 10. Everyone else works on one item at a time without the previous constraints.

Drum buffer rope

The Product owner creating the items tries to keep the inbox of development populated to 2 items. Everyone else works on one item at a time without the previous constraints.

Some observations

• There is no correlation between Effort and When will it be done?
  • The nature of the work never changed
  • The effort required to do each task was equal in all iterations
  • The time it took for a single story to be done (lead time) was wildly different in each iteration.

Things not included in the simulation, but can actually improve effectiveness

• Parallel work with integration at the end of the process
• Collaboration: swarming, pair programming, ensemble programming
• Variability of work: some items might be analysis heavy, others QA-heavy
• ... probably more

Run it locally

run the following commands in two separate terminals:

• npm run serverstart
• npm run webpack:watch

open localhost:3000

There are a few scripts to simulate iterations. They require curl to be installed (which is usually pre-installed on most systems).

• ./scripts/work_hard.sh - Workers process tasks in parallel
  • Optional parameters:
    • GAME_URL=[full game url] (default: http://localhost:3000/games/dummy) - Full URL to the game
    • TIME=30 (default: 60) - Sets the iteration duration in seconds
  • Example: ./scripts/work_hard.sh TIME=30 GAME_URL=https://afternoon-bayou-75731.herokuapp.com/games/4d8ba18c-59d6-455b-bc4f-dcc2a7dfa442
• ./scripts/kanban.sh - Kanban: workers limit their personal outbox WIP
  • Optional parameters:
    • GAME_URL=[full game url] (default: http://localhost:3000/games/dummy) - Full URL to the game
    • WIP=4 (default: 4) - Personal outbox limit per worker (applies to PO, Analyst, Developer, Ops; QA has no outbox WIP limit)
    • TIME=30 (default: 60) - Simulation duration in seconds
  • Example: ./scripts/kanban.sh WIP=4 TIME=45 GAME_URL=https://afternoon-bayou-75731.herokuapp.com/games/4d8ba18c-59d6-455b-bc4f-dcc2a7dfa442
• ./scripts/limit_wip.sh - Workers process tasks in parallel with a system-wide WIP limit
  • Optional parameters:
    • GAME_URL=[full game url] (default: http://localhost:3000/games/dummy) - Full URL to the game
    • WIP=5 (default: 10) - Sets the WIP limit for the whole iteration
    • TIME=30 (default: 60) - Sets the iteration duration in seconds
  • Example: ./scripts/limit_wip.sh WIP=5 TIME=30 GAME_URL=https://afternoon-bayou-75731.herokuapp.com/games/4d8ba18c-59d6-455b-bc4f-dcc2a7dfa442

Run the tests

npm run test

npm run test:watch

Format files

npm run format

License

Shield:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.