Kris Kemper

When I joined Thoughtworks, I went to India for training and played the Lego game as a way to experience a form of Agile product development. It was a lot of fun and a great experience.

Almost 3 years later, I got to help facilitate the game for the Agile Atlanta Users Group. Only this time, I got to be one of the customers. It was a blast.

In case you aren’t familiar with the Lego game, the objective is to form a team of people and have them go through 3 agile iterations developing a lego creature via story cards.

Tim Kaddon was one of the people subjected to to our lego demands and wrote a great blog entry about his experience in the game.

Thanks to Conrad Bentham for organizing and facilitating the session, and Adrian Wible, Lefak Fakiyesi, and Brian Gunthrie for participating and making it fun.

Top Highlights:

Seeing how seriously people take building anything, including a lego animal.

Seeing the big Aha! moments, like where they realized they forgot to ask the customer what they wanted, or what the priorities were in the first iteration.

Me trying to find a balance between getting the lego animal I’m satisfied with, and torturing the team in order to make the game more interesting

Being reminded of how great a forum the game is for communicating a wide variety of Agile concepts.