Gamify it until you make it Improving Agile Development and Operations with Gamification - DevOpsCon Berlin 2024 - Ben Linders.pdf

So many challenges, so little time. While we’re busy developing software and keeping it operational, we also need to sharpen the saw, but how? Gamification can be a way to look at how you’re doing and find out where to improve. It’s a great way to have everyone involved and get the best out of people.

In this presentation, Ben Linders will show how playing games with the DevOps coaching cards can help to explore your current development and deployment (DevOps) practices and decide as a team what to improve or experiment with.

The games that we play are based on an engagement model. Instead of imposing change, the games enable people to pull in ideas for change and apply those in a way that best suits their collective needs.

By playing games, you can learn from each other. Teams can use games, exercises, and coaching cards to discuss values, principles, and practices, and share their experiences and learnings.

Different game formats can be used to share experiences on DevOps principles and practices and explore how they can be applied effectively. This presentation provides an overview of playing formats and will inspire you to come up with your own formats.

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Ben Linders Consulting
Ben Linders
Gamify it until you make it:
Improving Agile Development and
Operations with Gamification
DevOpsCon Berlin, Germany, June 17, 2024

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Ben Linders Consulting
Challenges
Systems become larger and more complex
Adoption of new technologies
Everything has to be done faster
Collaboration and communication are crucial
Team Learning!
Explore and Improve WoW with Gamification

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Ben Linders Consulting
Collaborative Games
Talk with your neighbor about a
collaborative game you played
in your team or with friends
Explain how it made you feel
Examples:
Board game
Card game
Escape room
Team challenge
Workshop or
training

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Ben Linders Consulting
Trainer / Coach / Adviser / Author / Speaker
Agile, Lean, Quality & Continuous improvement
Freelance Editor for InfoQ.com
BenLinders.com
Books: Valuable Agile Retrospectives Problem? What Problem?
What Drives Quality Self-assessments Continuous Improvement
Games: Agile Self-assessment Game Retrospectives Bingo Impediments
Quality Coaching Agile Testing Psychological Safety Culture

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Ben Linders Consulting
Gamification
Applying principles and practices from
gaming in a non-gaming context
Solving problems/challenges collaboratively
Foster psychological safety & growth mindset for learning
Travel your own journey (emergent structure)
Enable learning and improvement

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Basic exercise (warm-up)

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DevOps Coaching Cards Examples
Why or what, not how
Visualize
Foster discussions
Align and focus
Engage into action

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Ben Linders Consulting
How to play games
Collaborative exercises
Related to the tech work
Safe place to play
Facilitate the interaction
Reflect and debrief

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Ben Linders Consulting
Collaborative
Tech work
Safe place
Interaction
Reflect and
debrief
Impediment Board Game

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Ben Linders Consulting

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Agile Self-assessment Game
Started as Agile Coaching Cards
Many game formats/exercises
Expansion Packs for Scrum, DevOps, …
Book: Exercises & Experience Stories
Testing, Quality, Psychological Safety
Kanban
Scrum
Business
DevOps
Agile

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Health Check

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Ben Linders ConsultingDeep Thought

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Team values

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Facilitating games
Preparation
Agree on scope/focus
Select/adopt playing suggestion
Preselect cards
Facilitating
Make it feel safe
Asking over telling
Decide on action

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Sharing Challenges

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Ben Linders ConsultingFirst Things First

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Ben Linders Consulting
How people feel about playing games
People like to play games
Become their authentic selves
Engage and encourage people
Provide different perspectives
Foster collaboration
Build relationships
Visualize what’s happening
Experiment, safe to fail, take risks

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Ben Linders Consulting
Key Takeaways
•Agile DevOps challenges are largely impacted by the
way people work and collaborate
•Gamification is a great way to get everyone engaged
and get the best out of people.
•Use self-assessments to find out how you are doing and
foster continuous improvement.
•Coaching cards with Agile and DevOps topics help to
focus and align on what to improve next.

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Ben Linders Consulting
Links
Agile Self-assessments benlinders.com/game
DevOps Coaching Cards benlinders.com/shop/devops-expansion-agile-self-assessment-game/
Testing Coaching Cards benlinders.com/shop/agile-testing-coaching-cards/
Contact me for a discount code! [email protected]

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Ben Linders Consulting
Questions? Questions?
Ben Linders
Trainer / Coach / Adviser / Author / Speaker
Agile, Lean, Quality & Continuous Improvement
[email protected]@BenLinders.com
@BenLinders
www.linkedin.com/in/benlinderswww.linkedin.com/in/benlinders
www.facebook.com/BenLindersConsultingwww.facebook.com/BenLindersConsulting
www.benlinders.comwww.benlinders.com

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