Learning SCRUM with LEGO

So Michael bought some legos to each scrum for this MIS software engineering course. It would be fun to do it in the lab so we scheduled the event today.

Actually I was late today so I missed the first 10 mins. But it was a video showing what scrum was about.

The whole game was divided into several sessions. Michael followed the rule very strictly by timing us. Since there was only five members, we made a big team instead of dividing into sub-teams.

We write down the user stories (the stuff we need to build) on Post-its. Then we put up a big poster paper on the wall. We first grouped them up by the level of difficulty. I actually disagreed with the arrangement we had but majority won.

Anyhow, then we put up another poster and drew three lines, each line is called a sprint (period), so there was three sessions for us to complete. I think each is 15 minutes.

We tried to construct all the vehicle in the first sprint, but we failed. SUV was the only one that actually looked usable, whereas the bus and the tractor were totally useless.

We spread the legos on the floor.

In any case, after we finished the first sprint, we had a short recap session. We were asked to think what went wrong. The first thing was resources weren't given ahead of time and we had to search for pieces which proved to be very difficult. Just look at the picture above. The only thing that was completed was the bridge. The bridge, like I said, would be the easiest....

That's Yuriy.

We continued to perfect our cars and build other stuff which I can't recall now. But  it didn't go very well either. The bus was totally broken when we showed it to the product owner (Michael) in this case.

Our final product.

When it came to the last phase, we still had to finish the bus. I begged to work on the tower crane because it was worth five points and I knew it was a simple task. 

We did most of it, but as you can see in the photo, we didn't manage to put covers over the house or the garage.  

The requirement said the garage must be able to protect the cars from bad weather. Jeremy said "well it can protect horizontal rains." LOL

Recap!

The final phase was reflection. We pointed out that resources weren't given ahead of time, and we should have collected the pieces and put them into groups in the first sprint. We also need to re-weigh each user stories. For example, houses are very easy to make and they should be done as soon as possible. But the dilemma was we need to need how big the cars are ahead of time so the garage and bus stop could be build. 

This nice exercise shows us several things:

1. we can't construct a perfect plan

2. we can't overestimate or underestimate any task

3. we need to be able to work as a team or things will fall apart

It's a nice exercise. We have a lot of fun.

This feels like one of thoses Google internal training event :P