Marshmellow Musings

Agile is a buzzword going around in the world of software engineering for a while now.

This week, our company organised a couple of team-building activities and one of them turned out to be a good hands-on experience on how to work in an agile fashion.

The task was to build a tower from a supply of a packet of marshmellow, tape and sphagetti sticks. We had a team of 12 people.

The first thing I asked, “Has anyone built this kid’s toy before?” My intention was to let them play their game and then we can chill. No answer!

Someone asked then, “Is anyone a mechanical engineer here?” One raised his hand. That number wasn’t too comforting.

Rest of us then thought, “Well, you gotta do what you gotta do!”

We just assumed that we need to use all the supplies. To make a tall and strong tower, you need strong pillars.

I was remembering the story of “Mr wolf and three pigs“. First pig was lazy and made its house with just straws. Second pig was a little bit cleverer and made its house out of sticks.

The third one was the most thoughtful and industrious – he made his house out of bricks. When Mr Wolf came and blew the first two houses, the first two pigs ran into the house of the third pig for shelter.

The Marshmellow Tower

We wanted our tower to be strong just like the third pig’s. In our team, some of us were dispensing tapes, some were relaying supplies  (including me)  and some of us were wrapping sphagetti sticks with tapes. It was taking time and we had a net time of 18 minutes to finish this task, when the heights of the towers will be measured and the group with the tallest tower standing still with a marshmellow on top will be the winner.

 At the end of five minutes or so, our chief operating officer started making triangles by connecting sticks with marshmellows. He made quite a broad base with interconnected triangles and it looked sturdy enough for a game.

It also attracted attention from others. We started building it out. The first group told that let us build two towers – one with tapes, stick and marshmellows and the second one without tapes. Whoever wins. The team got split – we tried two approaches for the same task, because we could afford to do so.

The second group got some enthusiastic team members working very hard and fast. Some were starting to make the tower go up fast, some others were very busy checking and ensuring mechanical strengths in each level before anyone goes up and crumbles their efforts. Eventually we got to level two, three, four – just like one builds a wooden house. We are all quite accustomed to seeing how wooden houses got built. Then, finally we put the cherry (sorry, marshmellow) on the top of the fourth level of our tower.

While we were at it, someone from our team was also doing some surveillance over other teams and they gave us the feedback of how some other teams were faring. Apparently, some other teams’ members were holding on to their towers without checking for robustness at every level. All that made the participants  in our team cheerful. There is a hope of winning the silly game!

When it is almost time to finish and some of us wanted to go for another level, there was an implicit risk-benefit analysis and the group declared, “Nope, don’t try too hard – one inch more and if it falls – that is worse than coming to second place”. So, we paused and waited for the bell to ring.

The judge (CEO) came and measured all the towers with a lightsaber toy. It happens so that some team’s tower fell as soon as they’d let go. Some did not have a marshmellow on top.  Some got broken during the course of measurement.

Our team was so invested in this little game – they cordoned off the table from anyone sabotaging the tower.

And, guess what, we won!

The Agile Method

Agile is an iterative approach to project management and software development that helps teams deliver value to their customers faster and with fewer headaches. Instead of betting everything on a “big bang” launch, an agile team delivers work in small, but consumable, increments. Requirements, plans, and results are evaluated continuously so teams have a natural mechanism for responding to change quickly. 

The agile takeaways I got from this little game of ours:

• Think about more than one possible path to solve the problem at hand
• Keep your final goal in mind, change the next step to suit your need, but never look away from the final goal
• Keep each building block of your product robust
• It should be extendable easily
• Do the risk-benefit analysis at every step
• Know when you are done. Don’t overdo things and lose your client

Another thought that stayed lingering in my mind – we are still all as much of a kid as when we were little.

We start playing a game, then get invested in it and forget the tiny differences in our personalities and preferences. We can. in fact. play well together without too much difficulty.

All we need is a good game to enjoy with a good enough goal to rally for!

Photo: By Carolina Grabowska from pexels