The final day of SPA 2007 began for me with setting up for my Scoping Game session. By 10:30 the first few people had drifted in and by 10:40 we started the session with nine participants, none of whom were visibly suffering from the previous evening’s ‘champagne’ or whisky sessions.

Nine was a good number as the game is best played in teams of three. I opened with a few slides on Scoping in Software Product Lines then we plunged into Round 1 of the game. 

In the Scoping Game each team had to decide which (of three) products their company would build and which features they would include in those products. Players also have to decide which features to make reusable and which to make application-specific. They have some added information in the form of market predictions of which features would be popular in the coming year and these can be used to help decide which features to make reusable and which to make application-specific.

In the variant of the game I ran at SPLC 2006 I’d begun the game with players each having individual pots of money and individual goals to maximize revenue for their product in addition to a group goal of maximizing revenue across the team as a whole. This leads to more tension and harder negotiation between the players but I felt that we didn’t have enough time in the SPA 2007 session to deal with this extra (realistic) complexity so we began with each team collaborating from the start.

Each team started with a collective pot of $45 million and the results of round 1 are shown below:

Team N*okia lost $5 million on the floor but we gave them 1 minute to find it and spend it which they did very effectively. This probably wouldn’t happen in a real Product Line scoping exercise.

Twitters had an extra $1 million that they could have spent and this could have brought them level with iCaramba had they noticed it.

Interestingly none of the teams developed the Starter Phone product. In a real Product Line Scoping exercise there would probably be a product manager arguing that the Starter Phone should be part of the Product Line. This leads to interesting discussions and decisions about what to include and exclude from the Product Line.

Team N*kia:

iCaramba:

Twitters, deep in discussion:

The next (and final) round considered a rescoping exercise where three new product candidates were being considered. Each team received new revenue based on their performance in Round 1.

iCaramba’s Round 1 lead proved unassailable and they were duly declared winners.

We concluded with some closing discussion:

• The game seems to be good for illustrating the tensions between developing reusable features and standalone features.
• There are issues over which algorithm to use to decide scope - there’s been a fair bit of research into this but often the people aspects of scoping are ignored.
• What should the organisation’s goals be - maximizing revenue, ROI or reuse?

Tony Hoare also joined the session part way through and seemed quite interested in the workings and progress of the game. Here he is with iCaramba:

In the end (almost) everyone seemed to enjoy themselves and took something away from the game. James Robertson in particular had some nice things to say about the session afterwards …