Utilizing online collaborative games to facilitate agile software development

Abstract

Effective collaboration and interaction among the development team and between the team and the customer as well as proactive attitude in initiating and implementing improvements play vital roles in the success of agile projects. The challenge is how to address these social aspects since neither the Agile Manifesto nor the Scrum Guide specify techniques that aid the human side of software development. To fill this gap, we developed a web portal which provides 8 collaborative games to be used in agile software development. The feedback received from a Scrum team, who leveraged the games in an industrial project conducted in OKE Poland, indicates that our approach improves participants' communication, motivation, commitment, and creativity.