Blogs, bikes and burndowns (Sprint 1 Review)

So, I'm living agile for a year.

It started as a joke to myself but now that I've completed my first 'sprint', I can see the benefit in doing this. It sounds sad, but I have genuinely been more sociable (as in, I've planned meet ups with friends, rather than just gone along). I've also got more life admin - lifemin - done, and I've got a better idea of the sorts of tasks I'd like to do in the next couple of weeks.

At the end of each sprint, I will write a brief summary. I don't expect people really to read these posts, they're more for my benefit, allowing me to look back over the year to see what I did as the months pass by.

I will also write more generally about things I have learned along the way, and will probably share these posts to a wider audience.

So without further ado...

At the end of Sprint 1, I have:
  • Added an introductory blog post explaining what I'm trying to do this year. This got quite a nice uptake, with over 100 views - something that's good for me. My friends have given me some really positive feedback on what I'm trying to achieve - they all know I'm a nerd anyway. It's nice to hear that they enjoyed the post.
  • Serviced my bike. This was a little bit more expensive than I was planning, but the man in the bike shop was correct to promise that "it will feel like a new bike". Riding my bike is a small dream again and I'm looking forward to the weather being a bit warmer.
  • Tidied and sorted my room. Sounds small and something that parents would ask their teenage son to do, but my room is tidy now (for the next three months).
Yes, it's a chore given to a teenager, but my room is finally somewhere to live.
  • Updated the address attached to my pension. As with the point above, I'm a little bit embarrassed that this was even on my sprint backlog as I feel most people my age are better at planning for the future than me. But, the important thing is I've taken a small step towards being in control. For bonus points, I helped my pension provider with some UX improvements to make to their website (as you may have gathered, I think I'm a digital nerd).
  • Planned a cycling day trip with friends. To be fair, this is half finished as I only just invited everybody else today. But I know where we're going and I'm looking forward to it. The point with these social 'tasks' is that I want to be better at proactively catching up with friends. I love hanging out, but I usually wait for someone to invite me first.
  • Drank Belgian beer and ate moules mariniere with some other friends. Again, it looks a bit of a cop out adding fun times with friends to a list of actions. But I want to get better at organising fun times for my friends and I. I even booked a table for this night out - this is the first time I've booked a table to see friends, I think.

Retrospective

At the end of every sprint, the development team responsible will have a sprint retrospective meeting to discuss how they can improve their delivery of sprints. The development team is just me, so no meeting (thankfully). Instead, I'll write a few words on my experience. Hopefully enough of these blog posts will help me observe ways I can improve.

A quick look at my sprint burndown shows that I have bursts of activity, in between many days of inactivity. I'm not bothered by this at the moment as I was still able to deliver most of my sprint backlog (the only thing I haven't delivered is updating my CV, but there is some exciting movements at work, so I haven't felt the need to do this yet).



Being able to access my backlog on the go is really useful. I think I'll continue to use Google drive for now, perhaps adding a shortcut to my home screen on my phone will make it even easier to update my sprint and product backlogs.

Comments

Andy Roast said…
Crap - I've just noticed that my sprint burndown isn't working in this post. I've imported the chart from my google sheet and assumed that it would import as an image, but it seems to be pulling through the live chart. I'll take a look at this later this evening because, y'know, what else am I goin' to do on a Tuesday evening?
31 January 2017 at 07:51
Andy Roast said…
OK. So it turns out you can import live data for Google sheets - which is really cool but isn't what I wanted in this instance. Easy to fix though, I just reverted to an earlier version of the google sheet and took a screenshot. That fixed this post.

For future posts, I will still import the sprint burndown, but will make sure I select the option that stops autoupdate occurring.
1 February 2017 at 21:08
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