Scrum Card Game: Scrum Sprint Simulation played as a multi-player card game
 | The main game material of Scrum Card Game, This image is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. |
A card game has been created in this project to support learners of agile framework SCRUM. The card game is used so that players experience work in a simulated SCRUM sprint scenario. It allows reflection of many questions and topics that happen in real life while working in a SCRUM team, too. Players act in a collaborative team environment during game play. Multiple teams can compete against each other. This game is typically played during a training or workshop.
Keywords SCRUM, agile, software development framework, education, training, card game, learning, simulation, multi-player, team work
The concept to simulate real life scenarios in game play turns out to be an approach for several authors in the agile domain. The intention of such an approach is to ease understanding of underlying methods and strategies for learners of the agile software development domain. The proposal of using such a card game follows the idea that a simulated game scenario is helpful for experienced players to either exploit situations not experienced so far and explore or test strategies when encoutering real life situations similar or close to the ones as simulated in game play.
Various proposals to simulate real life agile scenarios in game play already exist. Major differences among these simulation games can be seen in terms of game material, simulated roles per player, amount of players, effort of preparation and set up, abstraction or detail level of game aspects covering the simulated agile real life domain. By skipping such aspects the game moves from generalization to specialization of covered subjects or vice versa. Such that the choice of aspects leads to a training of either wider or deeper knowledge in the game scope.
[BNH03] describes the card game Problems and Programmers as a competitive game. Each player acts in the role of a project leader given same project tasks but solved independently from each other. Thus it restricts team play and the player will hardly gain more experience in team collaboration and team retrospectives with acting in and responsibility of different roles. Still it covers project phases from setting up requirements, design phase, implementation, integration, and maintenance. The game play follows a classic waterfall model. It does hardly cover agile self organizing, iterative, and retrospective recurring aspects.
In [FeSo10] the card game PlayScrum is presented covering the scope of learning Scrum agile method. It claims to be the predecessor of Problems and Programmers. Again it is missing collaboration of participating players. Instead each player slips into the role of a Scrum Master following the practices of Scrum. A die is used to determine the amount of cards to be drawn from a card pile on a player's turn. The team working on open tasks from a Backlog is represented in an abstract way by so called developer cards the Scrum Master controls. Having that said this means that team experiences by human players in different roles working in collaboration are not performed and shared amongst the participants.
This repository's subdirectories contain PDF files with rules and cards to print and play the game. Different variants of card sizes are available. To make the cards durable you could laminate the cards.
- Get the latest release in English or German!
- Additionally the repository's root holds subdirectories with names reflecting which card size related files can be found in there.
The card designs of the Scrum Card Game are available in PDF and SVG. If you can get blank business cards available as office supplies then you can print the PDF onto the blank cards. Another option is to print the cards on normal paper and then cut the cards manually. Heavy weight paper shall be used for enhanced durability. For better protection the cards could be laminated. The lamination foil should be non glare if possible and available. In case you plan to create own card texts or modify the existing ones you should go for an alternative approach like putting the cards into business card pouches for single cards. The cards are kept in the protecting pouches while playing and the cards can be easily removed from the pouch as intended, be modified and placed back.
Using card size of standard business cards (85mm x 54mm) will allow to use business card pouches for card protection. To ease printing and finishing of cards a business card size of 85mm x 54mm is chosen in files of directory named '85x54mm-business card size'.
Instead of searching for business card pouches in office supplies you could find similar articles in game stores stocking Trading Card Games (TCGs). TCG players often protect their cards with card sleeves or card protectors. The ones that match the business cards in size are called Standard American Board Game Sleeves (87mm x 56mm, 3-1/2 x 2-1/4 inch).
 | Using Standard Card Size Sleeves and Deck Box,This image is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. |
More common and popular for TCGs is a so called Standard Card Size (88mm x 63mm, 3-1/2 x 2-1/2 inch) with sleeve protectors a bit bigger than that (91mm x 66mm). In case you can get these in different variants then non glare sleeves are recommended.
In case you want to generate components like rules text or the cards separately or on your own.
Rules are maintained in Docbook format.
Related files can be found in Scrum-Card-Game/scrum_card_game-rules/docbook/src/docbkx .
The simplest way to generate the PDFs from Docbook using this repository is to install and use Maven.
Invocation to generate the PDFs from Docbook looks like
cd scrum_card_game-rules/docbook
mvn docbkx:generate-pdf
To just generate the cards with already existing card defintions Python is needed.
cd cardgenerator
python cardgenerator.py
The cards get generated in the same directory as SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics, W3C standard).
Cards are maintained in Python files. Python script files are separated from files that hold the card description data. This split of script files and pure data files is done although the card description data files are simple Python files, too. Thus this is done to not mix data with scripts.
The card descriptions can be found in cardgenerator/cardcontent.py covering all languages.
The syntax follows Python JSON (JavaScript Object Notation,
ECMA-404 The JSON Data Interchange Standard) format.
Card types supported by the cardgenerator.py are
- 'type' : 'story'
- 'type' : 'event'
- 'type' : 'solution'
- 'type' : 'problem'
Event cards describe positive, neutral, or negative impact on the game result by smilies.
Smilies supported by the cardgenerator.py are
- 'smiley' : ':-)'
- 'smiley' : ':-|'
- 'smiley' : ':-('
Titles and text fields should stay at a reasonable text length.
Any help in translating the cards into other languages is highly appreciated. If you want to volunteer and see any bigger technical issues on your side and already followed the descriptions then simply get in touch with a maintainer of the Scrum Card Game GitHub repository. You are welcome!
Translation (new texts and text replacements to improve existing texts) is mainly done by
modification of the file cardgenerator/cardcontent.py. Editing is done in any text
editor that supports files in UTF-8 format. Which is usually the case in all major
up-to-date text editors.
Adding a translation is simply done by adding the appropriate line per card entry. Language ID shall be in lower case. If an aphostroph ' is needed in your text then simply use double quotes surrounding your text.
If you scroll around in the file you will see that card content is defined in there and each card definition holds at least English and German text (if not even some more) directly beside each other.
E.g. like
cardcontent = [
...
{
'type' : 'event',
'smiley' : ':-)',
'en_title' : 'GURU',
'en' : 'A guru visited your office. You may immediately remove one problem card from the current story.',
'de_title' : 'GURU',
'de' : 'Ein Guru war zu Besuch im Büro. Du darfst sofort eine Problemkarte von der aktuellen Story weglegen.',
},
...
Now if you want to add a new language like Spanish, then this can be done with just adding in the curly braces
'es_title' : 'GURU',
'es' : 'Un gurú ha venido a verte. Puedes eliminar una tarjeta de Problema inmediatamente.',
or Russian
'ru_title' : ' гуру',
'ru' : 'Мимо проходил гуру. Вы можете убрать все Проблемы с одной задачи.',
For card texts not translated so far you should eventually create dummy texts entries for your language to assist upcoming translation steps.
And that's it! Some additional changes are needed in the scripts section currently.
As soon as you contribute a four eye review of your changes is performed.
The cardgenerator/cardgenerator.py holds a line defining which translations
shall be generated. It shall look like:
for lang in [ 'de', 'en' ]:
If a preferred language is missing simply add it. If a language is intended to be skipped then remove it. Any information missing? Just ask... You are welcome.
A possible cover page can be found as scrum_card_game-rules/scrum_card_game-cover.pdf
SVGs can be converted to PDF or PS (Postscript) in various ways and with various tools.
In case you insist to have rules and cards in a single combined PDF file a free tool like GhostScript could be used.
Concatenating multiple PDFs into a combined one could be achieved as follows
gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -q -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=scrum_card_game-104x69mm-en.pdf scrum_card_game-cover.pdf scrum_card_game-rules-en.pdf scrum_card_game-104x69mm-en-0_svg.pdf scrum_card_game-104x69mm-en-1_svg.pdf...
Here the PDFs scrum_card_game-cover.pdf scrum_card_game-rules-en.pdf scrum_card_game-104x69mm-en-0_svg.pdf scrum_card_game-104x69mm-en-1_svg.pdf... get concatenated into scrum_card_game-104x69mm-en.pdf.
Windows users might find GhostScript versions in 32bit and 64bit as gswin32.exe and gswin64.exe with similar command line arguments in place.
- http://scrumcardgame.com/scrum-card-game-rules
- http://docbook.org
- https://maven.apache.org
- https://www.python.org
- http://json.org
- https://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG
- http://ghostscript.com
- [FeSo10] João M. Fernandes, Sónia M. Sousa, "PlayScrum - A Card Game to Learn the Scrum Agile Method", Proceedings of Second International Conference on Games and Virtual Worlds for Serious Applications, VS-GAMES2010, Portugal, March 2010.
- [BNH03] Alex Baker, Emily Oh Navarro, André van der Hoek, "An Experimental Card Game for Teaching Software Engineering", Proceedings of CSEET 2003, 16th Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training, p.216, ISBN:0-7695-1869-9, IEEE Computer Society Washington, DC, USA, 2003
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