Being in the midst of agile processes every day, I can see quite easily how they can help build better software faster. I’ve heard tales of agile processes being used for non-software activities but I’d never seen it first hand so I wanted to see how agile applied to “real life”.
I got my chance when we decided to move. I knew that our understanding of our needs would evolve over time, but I did have a pretty good idea of what needed to be done to pack, find movers and do all the personal and financial preparation that this requires. At first glance, it seems like a good test case.
One challenge is that I’m not the only one moving. My wife is a critical component of the planning and execution of the move. She is not involved in software development at all and her knowledge of agile has thus far been limited to a few morsels of clarity plucked from her husband’s occasional soapbox rants. I had to convince her that this was a viable approach and that she would have just as much visibility and control as her Type-A personality required.
We started by talking through the central concepts of agile and how they would map to our move: stories of what needed to be done, iterative execution, rough sizing estimates and collective ownership. She saw how easy it was to adjust the plan as we moved forward - this was very appealing given the number of variables that were involved. We also discussed terminology that would be meaningful to both of us and to the process.
“Don’t you dare call it a sprint. I’m already stressed enough about this,” said my wife.
“We can change that,” I assured her.
Prior to getting my wife involved with the software, I felt the need to do a little prep. 
The first thing I did to prepare the system was to rip out those parts we didn’t need. VersionOne makes it very easy to remove fields and entire items from the display so we could focus on only what we needed to get the work done.
Next, I updated terminology to make the application a little more inviting. For example, since we decided to use monthly sprints/iterations, we just referenced them as ‘months’. A couple quick entries in a text file to alter the terminology and we were ready to go.
A quick walk through of the VersionOne application with these minor adjustments gave us enough to get started. First step: building out the backlog. My wife already had a list of items (did I mention the Type-A personality?) that we easily imported via the Excel Import. I added many more on my own through the application and we reviewed the list. 
The drag-and-drop prioritization and grouping into separate ‘Areas’ as we termed the Themes made it very easy for us to ensure we’ve captured, organized and prioritized all the work that we had identified. We then scheduled the items across the few months we had left through our move date and got to work.
We’re part way through the process and things are moving along well. So far, we haven’t been quite as strict as we could have been on the timing of our weekly standups. Being just the two of us, the communication has happened more naturally and constantly, as has the improvement in our processes. The most important thing is that the work is getting done in the iteration in which we’ve planned it out, which is always a good sign for an agile team.
It seems the few key steps we went through to get going are applicable for any new agile project:
- determine what’s required to get going and pare down to just that
- agree upon a common language
- train the team on the process and tools
- execute and iterate
Simple. Flexible. Logical. Practical. Yep - seems to apply in the real world, too.
