{"id":79,"date":"2011-04-20T13:17:15","date_gmt":"2011-04-20T13:17:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.agilityfeat.com\/?p=79"},"modified":"2011-04-20T13:17:15","modified_gmt":"2011-04-20T13:17:15","slug":"agile-failure-pattern-poker-game","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/34.200.113.64\/en\/blog\/2011\/04\/agile-failure-pattern-poker-game\/","title":{"rendered":"Agile Failure Pattern Poker Game"},"content":{"rendered":"

As mentioned in a previous post<\/a>, we played a game last night at AgileCville’s meeting last night that was fun and definitely kept the conversation going. We had some very good discussions around a number of agile topics, and so that itself is the strongest indication that the game had the desired effect.\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Prior to the meeting, I made up three kinds of playing cards. The first group were 40 failure patterns. Each failure pattern was a mailing label with a phrase on it like \u00abLong Standups\u00bb, or \u00abSilo’d teams\u00bb, or \u00abWe don’t do retrospectives because XYZ\u00bb. I kept the failure patterns as short phrases so that the players could interpret them to mean whatever they wish. Some that I included in my list are debatable if they are really a failure pattern or not, but I included them intentionally to spark debate. I printed the mailing labels and they all went on red or yellow index cards (note to self, I should have only used one index card color to reduce confusion, but I didn’t have enough of any one color).<\/p>\n

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The second group of cards were \u00abRemedies.\u00bb These mailing labels were all printed on blue or green index cards (again, I didn’t have enough of just one color). These labels all contained an agile practice or value, such as \u00abPair Programming\u00bb, \u00abBetter facilitation\u00bb, \u00abWorking software over comprehensive documentation\u00bb, etc.<\/p>\n

Finally, I included eight purple index cards, which were our wild cards. Atlassian<\/a> (makers of Jira, Confluence, and Greenhopper) was kind enough to sponsor the pizza for our meeting, so I included their logo on the wild cards. Thank you very much Atlassian!<\/p>\n

You can download my labels here (Word<\/a> or PDF<\/a>, setup for Avery 8160 labels) if you want to use them as a starting point.<\/p>\n

Now, on to the rules of the game….<\/p>\n

Suggested rules<\/h2>\n