Since fundamentals are the building blocks of fun, I think the best way to start this out, is by putting some life into the practice of the basic framework of the Agile methodology. Summer is in full force, and my daughter, Zooey, is in Michigan visiting family. I want to give her a head start when she gets back so she will be all set to enjoy the rest of her summer, and to continuously re-learn the concept that I am guessing most 7 year old children need to learn: how to keep her room clean.
I don’t want to set her up for failure, so I am taking a page out of my mother’s playbook and am following part Mom methodology and part Agile methodology. Mom methodology, according to my mother, is to clean her room the first time, and then continuously teach her to keep it that way. That will be my own personal challenge, however, I will approach cleaning her room within a week with the Agile methodology.
In Agile, I would usually start off with a Product Backlog to map out the work, however, this job is a week long job as estimated, so I formatted it into one Sprint Backlog. I used the Miro software for help organizing this, and I was impressed with the abilities that it has. I decided to break cleaning Zooey’s room into Five stories, each one has been assigned multiple story points, but for this project, because the job is so small, each story will take 1 day. So, 5 working days in a week, 5 stories all pretty much the same size, and the points will comprise 1 day, which will leave us with an ability to safely assume this will be a shippable product within a 1 week sprint.
If this were something bigger, I would have to assign each point with a size value based on the Fibonacci sequence (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13,…), I would consider each story to be a 3, but each story, regardless of the points, I have estimated will each take 1 day to complete based on previous times cleaning (which could be considered knowledge based on my sprint velocity, although I did not know I was Agile at the time, so the point value was assigned to the story, not the points).
I also presented a ROAM (Risk, Owned, Accepted, Mitigated) for two tasks, as they both require making sure the materials are available. Both have already been mitigated, so I am fully ready to go.
The job will start tomorrow, the first story, switching out Zooey’s bedding and washing the current bedding will be initiated. The Sprint Backlog has been designed below, assume I’m every position in this case; wish me luck!
