A Few Bumps In The Road

A typical sprint...

I am now in the 3rd sprint of my personal-life-gone-agile experiment, and the good news is that overall, it's going very well, and I feel like I am becoming more and more productive as I go!

This, however, has not been a straightforward nor an easy process. Let's review some of the big lessons learned here:

1. Starting to attempt to run your life as an agile project is an excellent way to help get off your butt, and get more things accomplished... And you're going to feel really good about it!
2. Life is freaking nuts, and your sprints will definitely get derailed, impacted, messed with, discombobulated, screwed up, and in all possible ways horked up beyond all recognition.
3. Lesson number two is especially true if you start this whole experiment just as the holidays are starting.
4. Lesson number two, especially when considering lesson number three, will be exponentially more true if you also find a new job during your second sprint of the experiment.

One of the first things I have learned is that two weeks is not enough time to accomplish everything I would like to outside of work, when work occupies such a huge amount of time. The answer I've come up with for this so far is to create another list to add to my scrum board:  the "Slow Lane" list. Yes, this means that I have some tasks that I do not commit to for a particular sprint. One of the problems is that my tool of choice so far, Trello, does not have any way of which I am aware to link multiple tasks into some larger "feature". So something like going through a lengthy course on Pluralsight (one of my favorite places to learn new things from, by the way) in my spare time can easily take longer than two weeks.

Perhaps I'll discover a way to link tasks into larger features in Trello, or perhaps I'll get inspired to write my own tool for this as a practice project on my own, but for now, I am trying out the 'slow lane' solution. My rule of thumb is not to have more than two items in the slow lane list at a time, and so far this is working out nicely.

Between the usual holiday insanity and the new (totally awesome and exciting) career opportunity, my second and third sprints have basically blended into one super-permissive 4-week sprint. I was able to pull in a couple of tasks from my backlog, but most of the tasks have been the same for the month. I've decided I'm ok with that given all of the events  this month. I am half-way through my 3rd sprint now, and I feel very good about being able to finish up what's left. That will bring me into the new year of agile awesomeness, and an exciting new chapter in my life as a software developer.

I hope that all of you out there have been having a wonderful holiday season, and I am very much looking forward to what's coming in 2015. Happy new year, everyone!

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