# Nexus Zoo

This game was invented by Mark Noneman and Don McGreal and is very appropriate for builing the first touchpoints of a team with a scaled agile environment.

# Subject

Processes / Scaling agile

# 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. The agile coach/master should not intervene with advices.

# Procedure

The participants should be split up into teams and develop a new zoo guide for a zoo while complying with certain requirements. The goal is explained to the teams and the backlog, DoD and NFC are presented. Each entry in the backlog represents a page in the zoo guide to be created. 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?

# Facilitator

Agile coach/agile master

# Participants

Three agile teams consisting of nine people

# 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.

# 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

# See also

Nexus Zoo