The Extreme Hour Revival

Erik Lundh

Workshop: 90 minutes

Summary

A team of volunteers set up an agile workflow and define, plan, design and deliver two versions of a product within 2+4 timeboxes. The audience acts as a market asking for new features while they see the product growing.

At the very first XP2000 conference Peter Merel and Kent Beck convinced the brave organizers to do a virtually unknown live team exercise invented by Peter, an agile simulation where two teams built two versions of a product within 90 minutes of setup simulation and teardown. The Extreme Hour has since been one of our favorite agile simulations, that many people have honed. The Extreme Hour agile simulation enables an agile team to set up. Defined, plan, design and deliver two iterations of a product where focus is on getting a product together within the timebox in a can-do problem solving mindset. In the early days we did a big Extreme Hour where a conference audience of 180 acted as the market, throwing in requirements during the simulation.

Short Bio

Erik Lundh has more than 25 years experience in software development. Erik has worked with mature innovation firms and start-ups, from small to large organizations such as Ericsson and ABB. Erik programmed industrial just-in-time (Lean) systems in the 1980’s, was a “process and management guy” in the 1990’s, and spent the fun part of the 2000’s as an agile evangelist and coach. In 2006 Erik was invited to Ericsson’s first major agile transformation of 2300 R&D people at 10 sites in 5 countries.