How to celebrate Chinese New Year in the style of Agile

It was near the end of Jan 2022, a week away from CNY. I was thinking it would be fun to plan CNY as agile sprint planning. Since I have been doing agile sprints for many years, I probably can try to apply that in real life.

8 min readFeb 7, 2022

For those asking what is agile? I got the following definition from the internet.

What is Agile?
Agile project management is an iterative methodology where work is completed in short sprints.
What are sprints?
A sprint is a short, time-boxed period when a agile team works to complete a set amount of work. Sprints are at the very heart of agile methodologies, and getting sprints right will help your agile team ship better software with fewer headaches.

Plus all the friends I was going to invite are working in the tech industry. So right people, right time.

Sprint Planning

Having decided on agile methodology, we need to set up sprint goals, there are a few goals in this short and happy sprint:

preparing some homemade food
create a Chinese New Year vibe
perform some traditional Chinese new year activities

Sprint Goals

Tickets

Having created the spring goals, we need some tasks to serve the goals.

buy CNY decorations
buy food ingredients
cook dishes
organise activities

As you can see there are some dependencies between tickets. And this dictates the order of how we execute the tasks in the sprint.

Sprint Execution

The sprint execution is always challenging and filled with surprises. Sometimes everything is well planned in sprint planning but stuck at the actual development. That’s why we need to keep our tickets as granular and specific as possible.

There are 3 important factors contributing to a phenomenal Chinese new year celebration. The vibe, the food and the activities. That’s how the execution plan consists of three stages. The first stage is shopping in advance, the Second stage is same-day preparation, the third stage is having fun.

1st Stage

We had some troubles at the very beginning. Affected by the global supply chain crisis, thanks to Covid😒, there is much fewer selection for Chinese new year decoration, and for the sake of having an MVP (minimal viable product), we chose the one below😉.

There are linked 4 big characters 春 (spring), each one also has a smaller character 福 (fortune) inside it, the Embroidery at the tail represents happiness lasting forever. The red colour in Chinese culture in general means happiness.

Unfortunately, the supply chain issue also challenges our activities planning. Initially, we ordered Chinese calligraphy brushes and ink from eBay. After we placed the order, the seller contacted us and said the order could not be dispatched in another week. The same thing happened with other sellers on eBay. It is a lesson for us that, these items need to be stocked way earlier than one week before. That is very disappointing. We then searched the local shopping centre and ended up buying oil paintbrushes and oil colours instead.

2nd Stage

In this part, photos beat words 100 times. Here is the food that we prepared on the day.

grilled fish with vegetables

firstly fried the fish in a pan, then grilled it with other veggies in the oven. the secret sauce is the hotpot base. fish is a pun with abundance in Chinese, meaning having abundance of fortune and bliss. In CNY, fish is an important dish and due to the shape of fish like a boat, it also has the meaning of everyone on the same boat (we are all together). No wonder fish always appears on the dinner table at a family reunion.

spicy boneless chicken feet

A lot of Asian countries have different variations for this dish, we got our inspiration from our favourite Korean restaurant in Strathfield.

stewed pork ribs with flat beans

This is the traditional dish from my wife’s hometown, northeast of China. Despite the rusty look and simple ingredients, this dish is super delicious, as my wife describes it, this is the “crown jewel of Chinese food”. I respectfully reserve my view.

stir fry of bamboo shoots with dried sausage

bamboo has a meaning of 节节高 (better and better)

brownie

just to add some dessert flavour for the dinner. This is actually a freebie from hellofresh.

3rd Stage

the friends arrived and they are now playing Xbox games while we are preparing the dinner.

The highlight activity tonight has to go to writing Chinese couplets.

What is Chinese Couplet?
The Chinese couplet refers to two complementary poetic lines adhering to certain rules, often written on red paper or carved on wooden uprights for appreciation.
A form of Chinese literature, the couplet varies in content and style, and can be poetic and calligraphic art.
Some couplets express people’s earnest love to their motherland, some describe the beauty of the nature, and some convey a maxim or best wishes for the coming year.

This activity is a tradition that people do to pray for things in the new year. Normally the elder from the family who is good at calligraphy will do the duty. In the past, if there is no one in a household good at calligraphy, they will ask someone from the neighbourhood to write couplets for them. We call it 墨宝 (treasure of ink). In return, they will give i.e some eggs as a small token of appreciation. In recent years, there are many printed couplets for sale, the tradition is kind of fading away. So just for fun and preservation of the tradition, we asked everyone to write their wishes in couplets. Couplets have quite some rules. I found below from Wikipedia

Requirements A couplet must adhere to the following rules:
1. Both lines must have the same number of Chinese characters.
2. The meanings of the two lines must be related, with each pair of corresponding characters having related meanings too.
3. The lexical category of each character must be the same as its corresponding character.
4. etc…etc…

But we are not experts, we just follow the first three rules and write whatever we are looking forward to in the new year. Since we have not done so for so long, we took our time to practice writing. 😅

Here is what everyone wrote

Bobo

good health and everything goes as wishes

I like how simple and insightful it is

Harriet

hers is funny and very specific, in fact, she hangs the couplets at the front door of her home office to show hows serious she is 😭

Promotion, big bonus, buy a property; lose weight, have fun and buy the dip

I was overwhelmed by so much ambition, she kinda wrote a little drama there in 12 characters.

Bai

everything goes well and as planned; Wish everyone lively and energetic like a tiger

I like the contents, but there is room for improvement on calligraphy

Ethan

his writing was ruined when he tried to fold it and take it home. It was a disaster when he found that the ink was not dried out yet.

|Wish everyone as powerful as tiger, earn a big fortune

The second part is a good one. there is a saying in Chinese that if a tiger has wings it is gonna be invincible, he changed the last character “wings” with “billion” (pronunciation is the same). Very smart!

Dumplings

It is a tradition that at the new year eve we will gather and make dumplings.

Dumplings are eaten during Chinese New Year because the dumplings themselves look like money pouches and are said to represent fortune and prosperity in the coming year. On top of that, it is a great way for the family to spend time together. What makes dumplings special is that they are mixed by hand for some time to ensure the fat in the meat really entraps all the juices. This way when the dumplings are cooked, they have a certain texture — soft, but not falling apart.

The fillings are pre-cooked, they are 三鲜 (three delicious items), chives, prawns, and eggs. Thus we just need to fold them. We put one small coin in only one of the dumplings, whoever got it is gonna have a great fortune in the new year.