“Projeto Industrial”’s session on the 11th October 2023 was dedicated to the Ball Point Game.

What is it?

In the Ball Point Game, a team tries to pass (circulate) as many balls as possible in a limited time (an iteration). Although based in a traditional game, it was introduced and adapted to Scrum and Agile practices by Boris Gloger in 2008¹.

The rules are simple:

Each ball must pass by all the members of the team (every player must touch every ball at least once);
The person that introduces the ball in the chain is the person that gets it at the end (starting point equals end point)
The ball cannot be passed to an immediate neighbour (at left or at right)

Teams have 2 min for organizing themselves and each team makes an estimate of how many balls will they be able to pass in a 2min iteration. Then, the iteration starts. After the iteration, teams have 1 min to make a retrospective and reorganize for the next iteration, making a new estimation before every new iteration.

The game’s objective is to introduce to the Agile and Scrum principles of working in Sprints and, at the end of the Sprint, reflect on the performance and try to improve for the following iterations.