Playing the Chaos Lottery

Testing Your Team's Resilience Before You Have To Rely On It

Abstract

A system's resilience is tested by stressing it under controlled conditions to find where it will fracture first. Finding where a system is weak before an emergency happens allows us to prepare & mitigate better. This is true of any system, including an agile team.

We know teams with good habits such as TDD, SOLID principles, pair working, D.o.D., low WIP limits etc. are successful. Intellectually teams know they are a good idea...but... the human brain is a tricky thing, and habits are hard to change.

A GREAT team does these things because its habit. It's just what they do. Every time.

A GOOD team USUALLY does these things, but ....there are often reasons they don't. It's not a habit.

Showing a 'good' team where they need to improve can be difficult. They may even be in denial any improvement is needed.

We know people learn best when can they fail without fear.

Enter the Chaos Lottery.

1 person in the team wins the Chaos Lottery! For a set time they withdraw from contact with their team, immediately & with no handover.

- If the team practise pair working, they know where the work is up to & finishing off without the lottery winner is no problem.

- If the team check code in often, there is no big chunk of inaccessible work - all but the very last bit is checked in.

- If developers and testers work closely, & the tester was the Chaos Lottery ticket winner, the rest of the team know how to continue with out her/him

Inspired by NASA astronaut training for solving complex, evolving problems on the fly, the Chaos Lottery is one approach to testing an agile team's resilience.

This is a meta-story about knowing what you should do (test your teams' resilience), designing a mechanism to do that (the Chaos Lottery) and finding that when our 'emergency situation' happened, we still hadn't quite been prepared!

Audience background

Basic understanding of good agile & XP practices, although experience of them is not necessary.

Benefits of participating

An understanding of why building good habits within agile teams is critical.
An understanding that we are all human, and good intentions are not enough!
An understanding that team members will take the path of least resistance to get the job done, and that won't always be apparent.
Detailed instructions on how to run your own Chaos Lottery if you want to.

Materials provided

Materials for creative thinking activity

Process

This is largely a story-telling session, but during the story the audience will get to discuss what they think happens next.

Exercise to show how hard it is to train creative problem solving, with short reflection afterwards

Detailed timetable

00:00 - 00:20 talk with small amount of audience interaction
00:20 - 00:45 creative problem solving exercise
00:45 - 00:60 talk with some audience interaction
00:60 - 00:75 questions and discussion

Outputs

Slides can be found here: https://www.slideshare.net/HelenLisowski/chaos-lottery-incl-activity

Original Blog post describing the 'idea' can be found here: https://fluidworking.com/death-sim-exercise/#gs.qLKNZ0g

History

A shorter version of this session was given at an agile meetup in May, and at the Aginext.io conference

Presenters

Helen Lisowski
NewVoiceMedia