View article

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”. However, agile methodologies have hardly provided any tools or techniques that aid the human side of software development. Additionally, more and more research suggests that customers no longer should be viewed as a passive source of information but need to be engaged in envisioning future business practice, discovering opportunities, and shaping solutions. To deal with these challenges, we propose a framework for extending Scrum with 9 collaborative games. Collaborative games refer to several structured techniques inspired by game play and designed to facilitate collaboration, foster customer involvement, and stimulate creative thinking. The feedback received from a Scrum team that leveraged our framework in two commercial projects, indicates that the adopted collaborative games: (1) make customers more willing to attend the meeting; (2) foster stakeholders’ commitment; and (3) produce better results than the standard approach