Scrum Tennis without the Balls

As someone who helps run a student work experience I thought this might be a useful share.

Scrum Tennis

This is a popular game with our students and also at conferences when demonstrating agile working practices. We use it to demonstrate iterations and reflection on our Missions to Mars in Cornwall, UK. The game gets the students up of their chairs, working together and getting to know each other on the first morning.

For those of you unfamiliar with Scrum Tennis the idea is to pass tennis balls around a group as many times as possible in a short time following some simple rules. One iteration is when a ball has been touched by every person and returns to the original starting point to count, the balls must have air time on each iteration and no passing directly left or right. That’s all. Simple really.

Teams have decide how they can complete the task and before the two minute clock starts state how many iterations they do. At the end we compare their intended target with actual. Then they repeat the exercise trying to improve their performance. Illustrating some basic agile practices.

Scrum Tennis for Remote Engagement

The 2020 has seen a change in the way we are able to run the work experience. Everything is now online. It has created some challenges to be able to do effectively. This July saw the first run through over four days with 24 students working together in teams of 4 in their homes from opposite ends of the UK. Fortunately all went quite well.

So here is how we replaced the tennis balls yet still gave a flavour of the game and got students practising their skills with Git.

Our work experience had students creating code for a rover. The code was to be placed in a team repository within a Github organisation. Scrum Git had them updating the repository Readme with their name and another identifier on each turn. We chose animal names in alphabetical order.

So the games progresses like this.

As before teams decide the order of players which must be stuck to. The first pulls the Readme from the repository. Amends it with their name and update (e.g. Simon — Antelope). Saves and commits in Git locally and then pushes up to the repository. The next player pulls the Readme, adds their name and animal below the previous (e.g. Simon — Antelope, Carla — Bear) and pushes it back. All the communication was done over Discord for the teams and Zoom was used as the main room where we could all get together to explain the game and discuss the results.

As before the teams had to decide how they can do it the most effectively. Objects can be made more difficult so those not playing can look up names and share results. But for us it created a great ice breaker, team bonding and practising the use of Git before it was actually needed as part of the work. And all separated by from each other across the country.