5 Agile development lessons from the lego sprint competition

At the recent Agile NZ conference, held on 19-20 March in Wellington, I wanted our Equinox sponsorship stand to have something different, relevant and fun. So with a bit of creative thinking we came up with the idea of the 'Lego Sprint Leader Board Competition' as a way of simulating agile development sprints.

How it worked

Conference attendees could enter the 'Lego Sprint Leader Board Competition' at our stand, and had to build a Lego solution that met the definition of done.

Definition of done:

• wheeled Lego vehicle
• Maximum of three colours (incl two colours in wheels)
• Minimum of 16 Lego pieces
• Must travel 180cm (length of our sponsor stand) unassisted

Entries that did not meet the definition of done were disqualified. Each entry would be timed from the commencement of building the wheeled vehicle to the completion of 180cm unassisted roll.

The participant with the fastest time over the length of the conference would win a Kindle Paperwhite.

IMPORTANTLY, participants could enter the competition as many times as they liked - i.e. they could do multiple sprints

Five Agile development lessons

1. The first sprint will under-deliver

With the exception of one or two, everyone who participated in the competition took a long time on their first sprint. Much of the time during the first sprint was spent on learning - understanding the goal and referring to the definition of done. When you adopt agile development, don't judge the success of the approach on the results of the first sprint.

2. Agile teams will continuously get better

Our leader board winner Dylan Hazlehurst participated in over 9 sprints throughout the conference; the first sprint took him 1 minute and 30 seconds and his final winning sprint just 17 seconds. I like the way that Mary Poppendieck puts it "If something is hard – do it more often and you will get better!"

3. People have different motivations

Following the conference I explained the competition to my wife and she asked me how many women had participated in the 'Lego Sprint Leader Board Competition', to which I had to answer 'only a handful'. She suggested (in a wise Yoda like way) that next time I should also include an activity with Lego Friends that wasn't competitive. Agile and Lean development approaches are more visible and measureable, it would be easy to make it competitive, but running your project this way will not get the best out of all of your people.

4. People become very creative once they understand the boundaries

Once people had performed a few sprints and were reaching the lower time limits possible with standard approaches, they started to look for creative ways, within the terms and conditions of the competition, to go faster. Because wheels were more fiddly to build, one person put only one set of wheels on and let the Lego chassis drag for the 180cm journey. Another person had a colleague build the wheels for him while he built the chassis (close inspection of the T&Cs showed that only one name could appear on the leader board per sprint, but there was no rule saying someone couldn't help with the build). A few people adjusted the blocks so that the pieces they required just happened to fall in proximity to each other. Support creative approaches on your agile project.

5. Creative ideas win

Followed a standard 'non-creative' approach, the fastest sprints we saw were in the proximity of 28-29 seconds. It didn't seem possible to break this barrier until the participants started to become more creative with their approaches. The fastest time from Dylan Hazlehurst was 17 seconds and in his winning sprint he had the pieces he needed stacked on top of each other, but not joined (in theory there is a chance that they could have randomly fallen this way so I let it proceed). It meant that all he had to do just one press to join multiple pieces together, attach the wheels, and let it rip down the 180cm track. On your Agile development projects, understand the boundaries and work creatively within the boundaries to stack things in your favour.

Winners

Congratulations to Dylan Hazlehurst of the Ministry for Primary Industries, who won the competition, meeting the definition of done in the fastest time of 17 seconds. Dylan won a Kindle Paperwhite from Equinox.

Second fastest time went to Tony from Statistics New Zealand with 21 seconds, and third equal time went to Martin Kearns of SMS Management & Technology and Zanda Rock-Evans of Foodstuffs with 28 seconds. Tony, Martin and Zanda each received a copy of the book 'Professional Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio 2012' signed by one of the co-authors Brian Keller of Microsoft who keynoted at the Agile New Zealand conference.