Agile Life

I’ve been working in a software development projects for a while. And it seems to me that agile is one of the greatest things in all the software development. It makes life easier if it’s followed well and driven by common sense. And under common sense, I mean not strictly follow the agile manifesto and practices prescribed by it. But applying them with awareness when they are necessary. So it seemed a great idea to me to apply some of them to my life.

Where it all begins

I started doing some planning not that much time ago. Something like 1 year I believe. And it was fine. I’ve got some tools to make it easier, implemented some practices and so, The start point was the utilization of taskwarrior to manage tasks, a calendar to plan the day or for scheduled events, and a bunch of spreadsheets to make long-term planning.
All of that seemed to be something like a project I’m able to deal with with agile. Because I have the terms, goals, and the definition of done.
And lately due to the lack of order in tasks I’ve taken a look on a agile practices. Issues I’ve been facing were:

• Lack of task scheduling. Actually I’ve been just adding them to the backlog and revising them on daily basis. It was something like rewriting all the tasks to make them easier to understand and adding an update to the task if it was not done.
• Lack of understanding of where all is going on. Actually I didn’t know where am I in terms of achieving goals. heading to by all of them. It seems it’s because tasks were rewritten daily. And those changes didn’t add any stability.
• Lack of statistics. It wasn’t that big issue. But currently, the ability to use it makes me happier. And forces me to revise what was done during the sprint.

Where is it now

The current state of things is following.
I’m utilizing sprints. Sprint is the plain agile sprint lasting for a 2 weeks. Mostly from Monday to Sunday of next week.
But they have a small difference. The planning session in a middle of a sprint. Currently, this planning session is set to the first Sunday of a sprint. Its purpose is to make planning easier by introducing the ability to correct the second part of the sprint. In life, you’re not able to always predict what will happen and it makes it a bit easier to do planning.

Rituals

As it’s scrum there are some rituals too. There are two of them planning and retrospective. Planning is rather obvious. You plan tasks for the following sprint. And retrospective is about the review of the results of the sprint. The main idea of it is to just check what was done, what tasks are dangling, and what should you focus on in the next sprint.