Friday, June 4, 2010

Agility in daily life

Several years ago, when I was first introduced to Agile software development methodology, I dismissed the idea saying that its just a temporal hype. Few years later, I re-considered it because I saw it staying in the trend. I failed to see its value until I tried it myself, and when I did I was hooked. I was not only hooked, it revolutionized my life as a software developer. First time in my life, I started enjoying my trade and it boosted my confidence on the reliability of the software I write. The term 'craftsmanship' really started sinking in.

Today, I find myself not only following agile principles at work, but implementing some agility in my personal projects. Recently I experimented it with some backyard gardening.

In Summer, I usually do a vegetable garden in my backyard and every year I do it in a 'waterfall' style which involves step by step progress (building of layers) towards the goal. My goal is very simple: plant different types of vegetable seeds.

These were some steps I took to reach my goal:

Clean the previous year's residues and remove weeds from the the entire area - > Cutting the branches from the surrounding trees to allow sun exposure -> Plow the soil in the entire area -> Make multiple small hills for different types of plants - > Plant the seeds. Let's say each step (layer) took one day to complete, which means I take 5 days to reach my goal.

What is the problem with this approach?

1. Instead of building 'features', I was building 'layers' for 4 days.

2. A feeling of overwhelming before the beginning of each day's work.
3. A lack of job satisfaction at the end of each day (except the last day when I actually plant the seed)
4. High risk (At the end of step #4, If I decided to scrap my project, my 4 days of work goes waste)

This year I decided to apply small iterative steps. Instead of doing one step on a particular day, I did one small but complete iteration in one day. I cleaned a small area, I cut the tree branches required to light only that area, I plowed only that small area and planted one type of seeds and watered them. At the end of that one iteration,which I completed in one day,I felt satisfied. I produced "business value".

We have a sense of achievement and job satisfaction when we produce a working solution. But it required a change of mind-set, it required breaking a huge use case into reasonable stories (e.g: Story#1 - Plant 10 pumpkin seeds). It required building 'features', instead of 'layers'. And it is the features what produces "business value".