Games and Exercises - Dev/QA Pairing

Photo by ion-bogdan dumitrescu

As part of my project kickoff/agile chartering workshops for teams, I like to include a game or activity to reinforce the agile values and principles.  I was talking to a Scrum Master who was preparing to lead one of these workshops, and we decided that an exercise to encourage pairing between developers and QA would be beneficial for her team.  So I tweeted this:

Looking for games/exercises to teach agile team about dev/QA pairing -- any ideas?

— Allison Pollard (@allison_pollard) June 17, 2015

I was pleasantly surprised by the responses, and I wanted to share the suggestions I received.  

• A good one for agile newbies -- nandalankalapalli.wordpress.com/2011/09/15/gam… (shared by @lisacrispin)

• Not so much a training game on its own, but a workshop is being developed with it -- http://inedo.com/release (shared by @apapadimoulis)

• A presentation with ideas -- http://www.slideshare.net/pmboos/agile-engineering-workshop (shared by @paul_boos)

• Check out Scrum Lego Game simulations, then modify to match your learning objectives -- http://www.lego4scrum.com (shared by @stevecrago)

If you have more suggestions or try some of these, I'd love to hear.