Author’s note: A portion of this post was also published on PubNub’s blog<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n If you have ever attending a lean or agile process training, then you may have encountered a coin flipping game. It goes by several names, including the lean penny game<\/a><\/strong> or \u00abpass the penny\u00bb<\/a><\/strong>, but they all share a similar set of rules and game play. In short, the idea is to demonstrate lean manufacturing concepts and how they relate to project management and software development.<\/p>\n It’s a timed exercise, where teams are challenged to pass a set of coins through the team, in set batch sizes, as quickly as possible, flipping the coins as they go. The outcome is that the smaller batch size you use, the faster you complete the game. For example, passing two coins at a time is much faster than passing 20 coins at once. Not only do you get the first coins to your customer faster, but you also complete passing all the coins faster.<\/p>\n We built an online version of this game, which allows distributed teams to play the penny flipping game. The following video demonstrates the game and the concepts behind it, and then the rest of this blog post shows in detail how we built it using real-time data platform PubNub and Clojure.<\/p>\n