Today it was the most creative day I had in HolidayCheck. At the start of the day, I had a simple Trello board with no tags, simple states for items. After talking with Wolfram, I have realized that I need to figure out a way to track my process from that Trello board. I will have 6 months of learning with different contexts and somehow I need to keep the balance among these categories. I know that I will tend to do more with Software Design topic, if I don’t find a way to balance myself. It’s obvious, I need to rely on concrete things like time I have invested on tasks or story points. Then Wolfram asked me if I knew about #NoEstimates. It rang a bell, that was exactly what I needed.
I have attended a training held by kodcu.com about two years ago. One of the sessions was about software development lifecycle and we talked about #NoEstimates in that session. I have dug a little more and I have decided to try this approach for next six months. Woody Zuill, the most important #NoEstimates advocate, has defined the term like this: “#NoEstimates is a hashtag for the topic of exploring alternatives to estimates for making decisions in software development. That is, ways to make decisions with ‘No Estimates’.”
With the inspiration that I get from this idea, I have decided to split down each task to equal work units, equal chunks. First couple weeks, let’s say three weeks, I will be able to test my performence as work units. The average of these three weeks will yield my velocity. After that point, I will be able to set my goals more realisticly for the next 5 months.
Besides the velocity advantage, also by the help of the work units, I will be able to get the exact numbers of work done on each main category. Each month, I plan to re-evalute myself on my self assessment document, and check if there is a corrolation between my self assessment and the tasks that I complete. I will be able to track my learning process!
I have updated my Trello board accordingly with the ideas flowing in my mind. I have added backlog for each category, and some other states to track my weekly status. I will even add a tag for each week in order to make data visualization easier. I have checked for the data visualization tools, but I couldn’t find one that satisfy my needs, so I have decided to write my own.
I want to share my Trello board. Feel free to share your ideas!