Engineering Blog

“Two for foos? Two for foos? That’s one for foos? And…. scooters!“

– any given afternoon in engineering, Rally HQ.

We play foosball. We play soccer (life-sized foosball). We play touch football. We go climbing. We drink beer (from a choice of two kegerators). We play frisbee, table tennis, pool, darts, have office chair races, ride scooters around the building, and go on “old man walks” around the block.

When people ask me “so what do you do at work” and I talk about agile software development their eyes glaze over. Even when I really try to jazz it up and namedrop from our client list. However, if I tell people about the other stuff…  they ask me if we’re hiring (and yes, we are hiring).

So why do we do this other stuff? The “forced fun” that consumes time out of our paid working day? And hey, why does the company stand for this?

Well, we do it because it’s fun. But there is more to it than that. A much deeper and important reason: we build teams fast.

The fastest way to meet people and build relationships is to play together. Kids do it and here’s a well-known secret: adults do too. Play a game of ultimate frisbee with a dozen other work colleagues that you don’t really know much more than a polite corridor nod “good morning” and by the end of the 60 minutes you can work together on any project. In a fast-growing company like Rally, where teams are always changing as people try out new roles and follow their career interests, you must be able to form/storm/norm fast so that you can perform*.

In a blog post from last year Jean Tabaka stated “A foosball table may be one of your best Agile tools“. What did she mean? I interpret this as playing foosball is an analog to agile software development. We form teams, work in pairs, solve problems, shoot for the highest quality, whilst improving and learning from each other. Practice is part of kaizen. Continuous improvement.

Playing is part of Rally culture. And boy is it fun.

* Tuckman, Bruce (1965). “Developmental sequence in small groups”