XSCALE Alliance

Critical agile research and development. An opportunity to take part in a DevOps moon-shot … to boldly go where no agilists have gone before … join us in a 2-day mission to advance the state of the art in DevOps and Business Agility. Our first global experiment!

Welcome to the cutting edge. Code Without Thrones is a hackathon with zero command & control for real businesses writing real code to create real products. (Though for this experiement we’re building robots that construct castles in Minecraft …)

Without managers, masters or owners, how can we keep our teams aligned and our work focused on maximum business throughput? .How can dozens of autonomous teams continuously deliver, deploy, align and adapt to changing market conditions together? Kim’s three ways were a fine idea, but how do we stop a bureaucracy from forming to stop them working? And how do we combine them with the principles of Business Agility?

By the end of these two days we’ll either know the answers to those questions, or learn what we’re missing. Because there’s no way forward in a learning ecosystem but courageous experimentation and fail-fast.

Descaling

We’re not starting from scratch. To begin with our brave experimenters will learn practice patterns for metric chapters, consensus treaties, round councils, leadership as a service, and descaling metrics we’ve proven over the past three years using the Game Without Thrones. Which we’ll need to generate pure autonomy & alignment … to the Dunbar Limit and beyond ..,

But the Game Without Thrones sessions were 2-hour collaborative experiments applying descaling practice patterns to Lego and construction paper. The point being to demonstrated that a large group can build a single, gigantic, Westeros style castle this way. We ran “GWoTs” across the Americas, EU/UK, ANZ and India dozens of times both to open peoples’ eyes to the tremendous benefits of descaling. And to learn from their experience to improve our understanding of the practice patterns!

Castles & Robots

This weekend Hackathon applies the GWoT patterns (plus some XPM …) to control robots building a single gigantic Westeros style castle in Minetest. a 3D multi-user sandbox game that’s replaced Minecraft in the open source world.

The technical heads among us will be programming in MoonScript, a lovely litle language you don’t have to study before we start - we’ll give brief tutorials as we go. And we’re versioning using git and using as much BDD/TDD/CDD/PDD as makes sense …

But if you’re not technical, no worries. The whole first day is just coming to grips with the problem and our descaling way of working, and on the second day only the people who want to code need to code. Lots of other things for you to do!

Bring Your Laptop

Doesn’t matter what OS you run - Minetest runs on Mac, Windows, Linux and Android. We’ll supply the network, the server, the software and the pizza. But seats are strictly limited so we’re putting a nominal charge of $25 USD on this to discourage no-shows. Actually $15 USD if you book before August 1. And for that you’ll get free pizza and a spiffy online certificate to say you’ve been one of our descaling devops business agility pioneers …