Looking a for Paid Collaborator for some short term work
Mark Levison
I created a game: https://agilepainrelief.com/blog/welcome-to-the-high-performance-teams-game.html to help people see what it would take to build an effective team in an Agile world. My intention was to show that you need a mix of focus on team building and agile engineering practice.
Each round they have a capacity/budget and that budget can be used to take actions (set up a build server, learn tdd, conduct one on ones, etc) or they can also choose to build user stories. At the end of each round the effects of the actions are calculated and we also roll a die to see how many user stories were finished. Additionally the game has gremlins – like interruptions.
Actions that have a positive effect increase the budget for later rounds. For instance if the team learns TDD, then their budget increases for some rounds after that.
A friend implemented a small fragment of the game for fun: : http://ec2-18-223-120-71.us-east-2.compute.amazonaws.com/ - code: https://github.com/outsidetheboxevents/agilegame
--
5+ yrs after creating some actions need tweaks but fundamentally the game mechanics still stand. All improvements/changes cost us something (time or money). Most improvements really only benefit us a while after we start. The failure to make improvements will eventually harm your team because you will either ground down due to technical debt of or morale issues.
-
I want the game to be playable online by attendees in the workshop. It doesn’t need to save state, like high score just allow them to make choices and play a 7-8+ rounds. UI could be dead simple – display the text of the choices and they select.
Ideally it would be an app that runs entirely inside a browser to keep my hosting costs low. That means the game will be written in some flavour of JavaScript. We will need to use a TDD/BDD style. Since I’m a recovering developer I’m ok with either. The huge caveat, I don’t know JavaScript and have only just started to learn.
What I’m looking for:
- A pairing partner to help build the app
- Setup the development and deployment env (for instance what build tool do people use in the JavaScript world).
Outcomes:
- A game
- A well structured repository that is tidy and easy to extend
- A deployment system that I can maintain without too much pain
- A fairly solid set of tests that I can extend
- The game produces a text log so players can see their choices and what effects they had on the outcome
- Bonus It would be fun if I could run all of the permutations and combinations to see if I’ve kept my game in balance when I make changes. This would text output from a unit test tool to a console
When done I do need to be able to add new actions/rules easily. However I don’t need to know JavaScript well.
-
If the game proves popular with workshop attendees it would be extended to display a historical graph of throughput or # of completed stories per sprint. Eventually I would also add a measure for morale and perhaps quality, also displayed on a chart.
---
Timing - I'm hoping that this is a couple of days of paired work and maybe an additional day of adding more rules from me.
Dates - I would like to use this in a December workshop, ideally I would be able to share with the world a limited version of the game as a teaser before the workshop. I've open blocks of time in Oct, Nov.
Who should I talk to? | Mark Levison | 1 (877) 248-8277 | Twitter | LinkedIn | Facebook Certified ScrumMaster Training: Vancouver | Edmonton | Ottawa | Montreal | Toronto Certified Product Owner & Private Training also available ~ Our Training Schedule Agile Pain Relief Consulting | Notes from a Tool User Proud Sponsor of Agile Tour Gatineau Ottawa and Agile Coach Camp Canada |