I have recently been talking about elaborating stories in agile projects and the topic of architecture came up.
As as result Philippe Kruchten sent me a link to the “Hard Choices” game – a game that can be run in workshops and training courses to demonstrate the difficult tradeoffs involved in architecture on projects.
http://www.sei.cmu.edu/architecture/tools/hardchoices/
It takes about an hour to play and from what I have seen of it, the game provides a realistic experience of the importance and challenges of good architecture in a realistic project environment:
Philippe ran this game at the Software Education Development conference and I have read through the game notes. So I am planning to add it to my training toolkit.
James King 