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.

Here is the cutting edge. Code Without Thrones is a hackathon with zero command & control for groups of up to 160 creating real products by writing real code. Starting with code for robots that build castles in Minecraft …

Without managers, masters or owners, how can we keep our teams aligned and our work focused on market impact? .How can dozens of autonmous teams continuously deliver, deploy, align and adapt to changing market conditions together? Kim’s three ways were a fine idea, sure, but how do you go about them without falling into a bureaucracy? And how do you 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 we’ll 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 experimenters will learn the basics of metric chapters, consensus treaties, round councils, leadership as a service, and descaling metrics though the Game Without Thrones. Which we’ll need to generate pure autonomy & alignment … to the Dunbar Limit and beyond ..,

Our previous Game Without Thrones sessions were 2-hour collaborative experiments using descaling practice patterns to build a single, gigantic, Westeros style castle out of lego and construction paper. We’ve run “GWoTs” across the Americas, EU/UK, ANZ and India dozens of times to open peoples’ eyes to the tremendous potential of descaling. And to learn from them too!

Castles & Robots

This weekend Hackathon will apply 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 taken over from Minecraft in the open source world.

We’ll be coding in Lua, an incredibly easy scripting language you don’t have to study before we start - we’ll give little tutorials as we go. And versioning using git and using as much BDD/TDD/CDD/PDD as we can …

But the whole first day is just coming to grips with the problem and our descaling way of working. Kids can do the former, and we’ve taught the latter to hundreds of people in under two hours with the GWoT events. So don’t worry about complexity - there will be plenty of folks in the same boat, and lots of friendly experienced folks to hold your hand.

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 and the pizza too. But seats are strictly limited so we’re putting a nominal charge of $25 USD on this to discourage no-shows. For that you’ll also get a spiffy online certificate to say you’re one of our descaling devops pioneers …