Mission to Mars: An agile release planning game

Mission to Mars is an educational board game illustrating the planning process in iterative software development; it brings together concepts such as: iteration (sprint), backlog, story cards and storypoints, velocity (productivity), impact of defects, technical debt, and risks. The game is a low-cost, Monopoly-style board game, played in groups of 2 to 4 students, where some factors such as uncertainty in estimation, actual velocity, and occurrence of defects are simulated by a throw of dice. Hard constraints and dependencies between stories are added to stimulate discussion on the strategy to pursue and how to mitigate risks. The game has been played in various contexts, academic and industrial, in several countries around the world with several hundred players, and it available to the software engineering community under a Creative Commons (by-nc-sa) license.