Badminton and Scrum ?

I’m always looking for new ways to conduct Team Building exercises or Retrospective activities that help people learn about Scrum and themselves.  One such exercise is the game of Badminton.  People laugh, but is the perfect activity. Plus, I see so many smiles from people when they see the badminton set go up.  I have no idea why, but it does.  Maybe it is a childhood memory or just something fun?

Anyway, Why Badminton and Scrum Team Building?

Well here are a couple of points and I will go into some:

• You can time box it or set a point goal for the winner
• It is a great Pair Programming exercise, because you can team up the people in two on two matches
• It is a great way to get people to meet each other by randomly picking pairs
• It is a great communication exercise between two people
• It can be set up in less than 10 minutes, depending on how tangled the net is
• Lastly, it is fun and gets people out of the office!

Time Boxing:

To keep the time reasonable cap the play time to 5 or 10 minutes with a max score of 11 points.  What does this do? Well it gets people to understand Time Boxing which is a key Scrum concept.  The 5 to 10 minutes is like a Sprint and the points a goal for the Sprint.  We sometimes finish early or we just get credit for the points we completed in the Sprint.  Now if time allows, you can let them play on for the balance of the 5 to 10 minutes.In other words bringing future stories into the Sprint 🙂

The other reason is that with 5 minute match times you can get 40 people playing in in 60 minutes.  5 minute matches in 60 minutes gives you 10 matches including switching time.  10 matches times 4 people is 40 people play time.

Also I learned that people sweat (not just me) and 5 minutes is the perfect amount of time.  The video clip below is just under 40 seconds.  Yes, they were making me sweat.

Pair Programming and Communications

A two on two badminton match is a perfect teaming tool.  The newly or existing Paired Programming team learn to work to together on a shared goal, beating the other team.

Here is a kicker they quickly learn they have to communicate verbally with their teammate, so they don’t both go after the birdie at the same time or just as bad neither one goes for the birdie.  They can’t Assume!  YEAH! Victory for us Scrum Masters!

Another pairing to try is between a Developer and a Tester.  It is a great way of teach the art of communicating the hand off of a story or task for testing.

Team Building

Again it is a great way for any set of teams to learn communications and how assuming the communication is complete will quickly cause defeat.  They have to talk to each other.

In large multi-team operations, I like to have names randomly drawn so people of different teams get to know each other.  It helps create a communication bond cross teams which is key in scaling scrum.

Lastly it is fun and a creates way to let off some steam.  I hope you try it.  They destoryed my old birdie the other day.  I said it was a good stress reliever at the end of our Sprint, but I didn’t think they would destroy the poor old birdie. 🙁

The Set-Up

Think of it as a Story Point.  There is no exact science though someone will google badminton to determine the exact size of the court.  I believe it is 20 feet pole to pole and 22 feet to the back line.  I used coffee cups to mark the corners.  If it is windy, place a couple of rocks in the cups.

I typically pace off 7 paces for about 21 feet for me and adjust depending on the net, just like a Story Point 🙂

The Set Up of the Badminton Set

The typical badminton set only costs around $30 from your local box store or like me have one buried in the garage or a pick at garage sale.  They come rackets, shuttlecocks (birdies) net poles, net, string and stakes to secure the net.  Make sure you get a set with 4 rackets, as many only have 2, and also get extra birdies because they tend to explode.  Apparently their is lots of stress and they tend to take it out on the poor birdie.

Why the jack stands? you might ask.  It is my little trick I came up with when I used to do the local business conventions when used to have a local website .  I needed a way of displaying and 8 foot banner high in the air at my both.  So I used jack stands to hole poles and the little wooden supports to the banner from falling inwards.  It worked pretty good.  What is also nice is that it eliminates the need for support string, therefore, anyone can set this up anywhere such as the office parking lot.

The stands consist of:

• a standard jack stand (a good yard sale find)
• Foam cut to fit into the stand and with a hole in the center for the poles
• 5 to 10 pound weights (10lb probably best) – again one can find in yard sales or like me from an old barbell set that I really should be using.
• Duct tape (which is used to secure the weights underneath the stands
• Either two 2×4 about 3ft long or assembled like I did.  My set up is a little lighter than a 2×4.  One one side of the 2×4 drill a hole big enough for the badminton poles (typically 3/4 inch min diameter).  One the otehr side you want a little cross bar to give it stability.

Here is a video of the set up.  What makes this neat is that you can now set up Badminton in a parking lot or local green patch.  The audio is pretty low, sorry about that.

Retrospective

In every Scrum Sprint we hold a Retrospective and sometimes the Teams identify communication issues or the Scrum Master observes that the team is making a lot of assumptions that communication were complete.  My favorite is when people update a task status or story and don’t tell anyone else.  They just assume everyone knows.  I see this a lot between developers and the testing or QA group.

And there you have it, a quick way to set for for the Retrospective or Team Building exercise.

Oh by the way, if you set this up every day I bet you will see people using it.  I always get people asking if they can use it.  And of course they can 🙂