Nexus Zoo

Subject

Processes / Scaling agile

Participants

At least 3 agile teams consisting of 3-9 people

Facilitator

Agile coach / Agile master

Summary

This game was invented by Mark Noneman and Don McGreal and is appropriate for building the first touch points of teams with a scaled agile environment.

Definition

During the game, a zoo guide is created in several groups. Certain predefined requirements have to be fulfilled during a sprint, whereby the teams are dependent on each other and cooperation is necessary. It is exciting to see how this cooperation is shaped. Learnings can be transferred to later real-work-setting.

Motivation

This game is supposed to overcome the difficulties of the collaboration of several teams. It is a good exercise to see how agile teams are dealing with dependencies while working self-organized.

Results

In the end, a discussion about the benefits or disadvantages of the used scaling practices takes place and the teams can find their own scaling adaption, which fits best to their environment.

Benefit

The challenges and solutions of working in a scaled agile environment can be vividly and playfully experienced in a short time.

Procedure

The participants should be split up into teams and develop a new zoo guide while complying with certain requirements. The goal is explained to the teams and the backlog, DoD and NFR's are presented. Each entry in the backlog represents a page in the bound booklet to be created. Time keeping is an essential feature of the game. The teams have four minutes to choose their task(s) for their first sprint as well as planing the sprint. A sprint lasts only ten minutes. The goal is to meet the DoD. The agile coach/master should not intervene with advice. The facts that the agile coach should make transparent in the end, are related to the following aspects:

• coordination among the teams (e.g., on the animals that share the same page color)
• how was the communication among the teams
• were they able to agree on some issues
• the continuous integration of features (pages for the zoo guide)
• the integration of the features only at the end
• cross-team dependencies
• what new roles were found within the teams

Tools

Multi-colored paper, tables for the teams, pens, a folder with three hole binding and a transparent cover, three hole punch, a Definition of Done on flipchart, a predefined product backlog in the form of requirement cards, non-functional requirements also written on cards

Hints

This game is particularly useful if you are just about to start using a scaling framework such as Nexus.

See also

Don McGreal (2016): "Nexus Zoo (a scaling simulator)" TastyCupcakes.org