In agile software development, where great emphasis is put on effective informal communication involving diverse stakeholders, success depends on human and social factors. Not surprisingly, the Agile Manifesto advocates principles and values such as “individuals and interactions over processes and tools”, “focus on the customer”, “collaborate regularly”, “communicate face-to-face within the team” and “have regular team introspection”....

The crucial element of any agile project is people. Not surprisingly, principles and values such as "Respect for people", "Communication and Collaboration", "Lead using a team approach", and "Learn and improve continuously" are an integral part of Open Kanban. However, Open Kanban has not provided any tools or techniques to aid the human side of software development. Moreover, as a Lean initiative, it is not as comprehensively...

Although the emergence of agile methods has triggered a growing awareness that social factors have a crucial impact on the success of software projects, neither the Scrum Guide nor the Agile Manifesto prescribe techniques that aid the human side of software development. To address this challenge, we enriched the Scrum process with a set of collaborative games. Collaborative games refer to techniques inspired by game play, but designed...

Effective collaboration and interaction among the development team and between the team and the customer as well as proactive attitude in initiating and implementing improvements play vital roles in the success of agile projects. The challenge is how to address these social aspects since neither the Agile Manifesto nor the Scrum Guide specify techniques that aid the human side of software development. To fill this gap, we developed...

In agile software development, where great emphasis is put on effective informal communication, success depends heavily on human and social factors. However, Scrum does not specify any techniques that aid the human side of software development. In this paper we investigate the use of 6 collaborative games for the Sprint Retrospective. Each game was implemented twice in a Scrum team in Intel Technology Poland. The received feedback...