Is Life connected to Agile or is Agile connected to Life?
Have you tested yourself? Are you with or without error?
I have been in the Software industry for eight years and during my eight years as a quality engineer I have tested a fair number of products achieving a variety of accomplishments verifying the quality of products along the way. One fine day while I was sitting in the park hearing the beautiful sounds of leaves, birds chirping and people chatting I was struck with an epiphany! Even the human body is developed like software. If you look at evolutionary theory then it seems obvious that the human body wasn’t designed but rather, through trial-and-error the human body was shaped to conform to the demands of the world.
Agile engineering methodology follows the same philosophy of trial and error. When developing software the company that is funding the product is unsure of what they exactly want in the beginning but has the intention of using a product that will reduce their manual activities and improve overall turnaround time.
Let’s take the pencil as an example. It was in 1560 when a shepherd discovered that a black substance hanging from upturned roots could be used to mark sheep. Later, artists started using the same substance for their artwork and now we have variety of pencils available in the market. It started from graphite composites and cedar pencils to smart pencils sets. Isn’t this a form of iterative process? Isn’t this agile transformation? This invention that was found by total happenstance started out from nothing and evolved into more than the original user could have imagined.
As a Quality Engineer, I imagine myself as a product. This Human product is made up of User Stories. It’s not final and as days pass it will be developed from time to time. This product is decomposed into user stories such as “Development of Organs,” “Learning Intellectual Skills,” “Language Skills,” “Emotions,” “Absorption,” “Judgements,” “Observation,” “Creating Taste buds”. Everyone has a manager in their life and for my Human Product I have an Internal Voice that acts as my project manager. It directs me on what to do and what not to do. At this moment, my inner voice is directing me to write this article and giving me a hell of a lot of ideas. But where does my inner voice (my project manager) generate these thoughts? How does he guide me? How does he direct me? I have not simply designated my inner voice as my project manager. A project manager has not started their career as a project manager. They have arrived at this position in their career because of their own experiences, lessons learned from previous projects. Similarly, the inner voice generates these kinds of thoughts and gives you a direct based on past experiences.
So now I have a Human Product with an inner voice as my Project Manager who is directing me. Let’s try to understand what it would look like if we associate the agile methodology with my Human Product. When I was born I wanted to become a doctor because my family doctor used to joke around and have fun with me while I was visiting his office. He was so good at what he did I didn’t even realize how painful shots were. I concluded one day that I wanted to become a doctor. That was added in my backlog, “User story for Human Product: Become Doctor.” I am acting as a client who doesn’t know exactly what he needs but has goals to become something in life.
After few years I gained some visibility on what life really is and came to realize that I am a good cook. I realized I should revisit my backlog and update the story title from “User story for Human Product: Become Doctor” to “User story for Human Product: Cook”.
Time passed and I realized that I am also good at Engineering, but then I realized I was confused. I surmised that I should not be updating the title of the previous story but instead I should add it to my backlog. I decided to revisit the story when the appropriate time came, and hence my project manager (inner voice) directed and added a new story “User story for Human Product: Become Engineer”. More time passed and I realized that I am good with computers and did some Backlog grooming. I further edited the story from “User story for Human Product: Become Engineer” to “User story for Human Product: Become Computer Engineer”. This is how I started from nothing but suddenly found myself with something to achieve.
The next step for my Human product is Sprint Planning. I have a backlog, but what do I do next? It was bachelor degree time and I picked “User story for Human Product: Become Computer Engineer” to complete in the sprint for 4 years. To accomplish this, I had a one on one scrum meeting with my project manager (Inner voice). I would give him updates on my day to day activities, and he guided me on what may happen in the future, but that was just an assumption based on the past experiences.
Failures are part of success and I went through more failures then successes. I went through academic failures and love failures. The belief is that if it is possible to learn from failure then the sooner the failure occurs, the sooner the learning begins (Fail Early). Sometimes we want to fail quickly so that we can begin the learning process as fast as possible (Fail Fast) and once you are well versed and kind of accepting failures (Fail Often) there are more chances to grow, learn and steer project in the right direction. In addition, this will remove the need to waste time by working on the incorrect thing.
There were certain surprises which were not planned and were brought into the sprint such as love failures. The Project manager played an important role here. He was very diplomatic with his suggestions. He didn’t ask me to come out of love failure nor did he ask me to feel regret from the love failure instead he made me aware of Reprioritization. Hence, I kept all the options in front of me both the pros and cons, leading me to feel comfortable kicking the love failure story out of the sprint.
I had a lot of Sprint health checkups with my project manager and I would provide updates about my progress to completing the story and any blockers I was encountering. After 3 years I started visiting my Backlog again (Backlog Grooming) to understand what I would do after 4 years of engineering. The sprint for “User story for Human Product: Become Engineer” was going to end soon so I added “User Story: Find a Job” to my Backlog. I had to switch gears back and forth because it was a crucial time for the completion of the third year of the sprint and I was planning for post sprint tasks too.
Sprint ended, and I now have my bachelor’s degree, yay! Next the phase is a Job Campus interview where a demo of the Human Product actually happens (Sprint Demo).Suddenly I have an offer letter in hand which means it was time to have a Sprint retrospective with my manager and understand where I went wrong, what I did well and further actions to be taken going forward. Classic agile methodology at work! After all that work questions started to arise. Have I tested myself? Have I truly quality assured my own decisions, actions or otherwise? Have you?
