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Agile Fluency Project

The Agile Fluency® Game

The Agile Fluency Game authentically simulates 2.5 years (10 seasons) on a software development team. It was developed so experiments in the game lead to new insights about your real-world options. Game players learn about the benefits and trade-offs of adopting agile practices. Of course, they must also deliver features! Or what’s the point?

Saved us money on our agile transition effort by getting a preview in 90 minutes!

Director, Agile Center of Excellence

Makes the need for best practices come to life.

Manager

Played first game and beautifully painted ourselves into a corner through the same mistakes real teams make. How’d that happen? Powerful teaching.

Senior Learning & Development Manager

[Our leadership team] experienced 20 years of agile learning in 4 hours!

Director, R & D

The shift from playing the game gave new focus to our discussion of leadership challenges.

VP Product Management

The Premise:

Game play in progress…

Photo courtesy of Bart den Haak

You take on the role of a team that's leading the agile transformation and adopting an agile approach for the first time.

Each season, you'll decide how to invest your effort. Your quest is to decide how best to spend your limited time. Do you develop features or learn new practices? Which features? Which practices? Features are the only way to earn points, but agile practices help you do more.

Your boss is totally focused on results. As long as you deliver a great product to your customers, she doesn't care how you do it. She needs to see a regular flow of new features, but other than that, the choices are up to you. Your challenge is to find the right mix of features and practices to get the most money possible.

The Authors:

James Shore and Arlo Belshee developed the euro-style board game. Both are Agile Alliance Gorden Pask Award recipients, software developers, and experienced game players.

One session with a retrospective on your play may be all you need to stimulate actionable insights. Yet the game challenges prior assumptions, and most players enjoy the opportunity to try for a better score. Each time brings greater understanding of the benefits, trade-offs, and investments you need to succeed.

Do you want to play the game?

James Shore offers in-person and remote workshops featuring the Agile Fluency Game. He guides participants as they play the game and learn how to apply its lessons to their real-world work. It’s great as a standalone workshop, an icebreaker for an internal conference, or as part of larger work process design discussion.

Other Agile Fluency Game facilitators across the globe also use the game to conduct work sessions for intact teams and leaders. If you’re a facilitator, Scrum Master, or coach who’d like your own copy of the game, we offer training and boxed sets for people who want to use it in their own practice. Contact James Shore for more information!

Learn More About the Workshop Contact James Shore
1–2 Days, Classroom
  • Workshop
  • In-Person

Game Facilitators’ Workshop

Get your own copy of the Agile Fluency Game! The Agile Fluency Game is an amazing hands-on tool for teaching teams and leaders how Agile works in practice. You’ll learn how to facilitate the game, then go even further as you design powerful interactive learning experiences from a series of mini-workshops involving the game materials.