A LITTLE GAME ABOUT REAL TRADE-OFFS
Sprint
Survival.
Ship work that matters.
Keep the humans in the picture.
Three sprints. Five scenario packs. One mentoring app. A rubber duck with absolutely no authority over your backlog.
Let’s plan a sprint> product: Mentor Match
> mission: better first sessions
> team: humans, not machines
“Have you tried making the scope smaller?”
YOUR UNOFFICIAL DUCK CONSULTANT
YOUR FIRST DAY
You’re guiding Mentor Match.
A fictional app helps women entering tech book a conversation with a mentor. Choose useful work, respond to a surprise and review what happened. A sprint is a short period of focused work. Your backlog is the list of work you could do next.
01 / Choose your focusBuild a plan in the order you want the work done. Some tasks need others first.
02 / Expect a surpriseMake a decision, then adjust your plan to fit the new capacity.
03 / Learn and repeatReview delivery and wellbeing. There is no timer and no leaderboard.
Small game. Useful conversations.
These numbers are fictional teaching tools. Effort units represent available working time, not story points. Value is an estimate, not proof of impact. Wellbeing is simplified here; in real teams, ask people how they are doing.
What are the rules?
Each sprint starts with 12 effort units. A support-focused approach reserves 2 units and adds 8 wellbeing points; a steady approach adds 2 wellbeing points; a stretch approach adds 2 units but costs 10 wellbeing points. Events make further changes.
Wellbeing starts at 80 out of 100. Below 65, the following sprint loses 1 capacity unit; below 45, it loses 3. The game uses the wellbeing at the start of a sprint to calculate that sprint’s capacity. Any unfinished planned work costs 4 wellbeing points per sprint, regardless of task count.
Work is attempted in the order you select it. When the next task does not fit, delivery stops. Unfinished tasks return to the backlog with no partial progress. Completed tasks stay completed. A goal is met when all its named tasks are complete, including work delivered earlier.
Where do the scenarios come from?
All 15 situations, dialogue suggestions and game choices are original fictional teaching examples written for Coded Female. The newer packs explore AI review, shared decisions, dependencies, workload and release quality. Research informs the themes; the characters, events and numerical effects are invented.
Further reading: DORA: Balancing AI tensions (March 2026) and Atlassian: Developer experience research (2025). These sources do not validate the simulator or endorse Coded Female.
Make it your own
Change a task, write a new event or compare two decisions with a friend. The project includes readable source code and beginner challenges in its README.