Adopting collaborative games into Open Kanban

The crucial element of any agile project is people. Not surprisingly, principles and values such as “espect for people”, “Communication and Collaboration”, “Lead using a team approach”, and “Learn and improve continuously” are an integral part of Open Kanban. However, Open Kanban has not provided any tools or techniques to aid the human side of software development. Moreover, as a Lean initiative, it is not as comprehensively defined process as Scrum or XP. Accordingly, inexperienced Kanban teams may feel a bit lost. To deal with these challenges, we propose an extension to Open Kanban, which contains a set of 12 collaborative games. The feedback received from three Kanban teams who leveraged our extension in commercial projects, indicates that the adopted games improved participants' communication, commitment, motivation and creativity.