Let’s add some ingredients

Before you continue

If you have followed me this far may be you are a coach that usually facilitate Elephant Carpaccio sessions, so you can pursue and evaluate whether variations that I suggest can do for you. It ‘also possible that you’re never come in touch with this exercise, but you’re interested in its application: in this case jump to the bottom of the article, look for the references to the original version and start from there.

Hey, this is an agile system, isn’t it ?

Are we missing a spice ?

A couple of months ago I was at home, reading some stuff on the web. It was about 10 minutes to midnight. The day was spent quietly, Stefano and me had facilitated a session of Elephant Carpaccio with a relatively new team. Then I received an email from Pasquale, one of the developers who had participated in the workshop. The subject seemed ominous: “8 minutes”. Fortunately, the content of the email was not about the end of the world. That was the time had taken him to develop from scratch, using Python, the same application that he had failed to complete during the workshop. The coding phase in the exercise lasts 40 minutes, and Pasquale had used PHP which is a language that he usually use.

What went wrong ? It wasn’t a speed exercise, it was about splitting and about incremental development. Midnight came, the world is still here, my certainties about the workshop are gone.

So I remembered two teams I have met in a previous session: the first has split the application into 12 slices and has completed the development, delivering the first valuable slice at the end of the the second sprint (out of 5). The second team has splitted into only 5 slices, has finished the application but has delivered the first valuable slice at the end of the the sprint 4.

Then I realized that although we had tried to be crystal clear, seasoned developers have concentrated on the code rather than on continuous delivery of value. The old, bittersweet waterfall process, blessing and curse for developers.

At that point I spoke with other coaches, Stefano, Francesco, Valerio and we thought possible variations that I started to test immediately.

Obviously, the result of a workshop is influenced by both the participants and the way in which we facilitate. There isn’t the best variation for all occasions, but now I have more options to choose from, including the original version.