Bringing incremental development and testing to Stabil-IT
Updated: Dec 29, 2019
Stabil-IT, the agile service management business simulation, has always contained the concept of life-cycling the solutions represented in the game. This ties into the other games as it is considered that Stabil-IT "creates" some of the level II and level III versions of the solutions used in the other two simulations of Total-IT.
This said, a single high effort action used to create a new version seems outside of the whole agile/DevOps approach of the game, where incremental steps are more in-keeping. To this end, the game has been redesigned to add three incremental development steps and up to three testing steps before releasing the new version. The testing steps are optional but releasing without testing will create disruption in the solution.
To bring this adaptation to the table two new tokens have been created and one token has been re-purposed from UPGRADE! - the "tune" token.
As well as the tokens, the old backlog item tile has been replaced by a new tile of effort 1, making it accessible in most sprints.
For the non-player solutions, once players have attained sufficient influence they can begin to develop these solutions. When released, business value is given to the players that contributed to the development with the final player achieving the release leaving their stability marker in place to the end of the game at which time they receive the stated business value. Development and testing tokens add to the influence assessment at the end of the round.
Any one solution can only be developed/tested/released by one step per sprint.
A little more on scoring with the new incremental development solution:
When a fully developed solution is released, a stability token is placed on the first available position and will remain there to the end of the game at which time it will be scored. The exception to this is the Logistics solution which rewards influence for its first release - this is taken immediately.
When releasing your own developed solution, recover all development and testing tokens once the action is completed.
When developing your own solution, any development tokens still on the board at the end of the game are scored at one point each.
When developing a non-player solution, only a player that has contributed to the development can release the new solution. When a solution is released, recover all development and testing tokens once the action is completed. Players receive one business value point for each recovered development token in their colour. If there are no business value tokens available, the development tokens are left in place and counted at the end of the game.
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