'Agile' Wife

Agile means division of tasks and adapting to change in the plans. You will see the irony in the concept conflated here, in a minute.

Let's consider our common woman, rather a common wife found next door and draw an analogy to the agile process that is followed almost in every project in all the companies around the world. For the sake of this analogy and respect to all grandmothers, great grandmothers and some mothers in previous generation, I have not considered the Agile Wife as a working woman here. You can extrapolate that scenario from this one and empathize if you are a human being.

For those of you who are not familiar with Agile concept, here is a synopsis. A product is broken into stories by means of requirements, requirement is analyzed and refined by a team, assigned story point complexity, developed by another team, time and efforts vary based on the complexity, tested by another team, fixed and retested for quality, rerun many times and then demoed to stakeholders in business, and finally goes to production which is called go-live. In the process of this product going live in production, there are sprints where the stories are taken up and worked upon based on priority, after sprint planning, capacity planning and refinement, and then later reflected on during sprint retrospective and sprint review.

This is where I come in. Not the testing and production go-live part which I do at work, but the part where I compare it to household chores which will be henceforth called as stories/tasks.

In a typical household, an Agile Wife has a usual list of things to do, and this is the common denominator across the world. If the Agile Wife is from India/Asia, the number of stakeholders at home increases and that's the only difference.

The product owners in my analogy are the family members who conveniently carve out stories based on their requirement. Once the requirements are known, which is pretty much the same everywhere like I said - making food, washing clothes and doing dishes (even if a machine does it, guess who loads and dries and folds and arranges them?) , taking care of babies/kids/children (taking care of parents-in-law/parents if the Agile Wife is Indian/Asian). 

Now let's carve out just cooking alone. The task is broken down to dishes, and the deadline is always the same because people can't have breakfast at lunch time right? Obviously. And to meet the deadline, the only thing the Agile Wife can do is to wake up early because cooking the previous day doesn't work well when the product goes live. Be it a complex story like making an elaborate meal for 4 or a regular meal for 8, the story point is never high. In fact, there is no refinement happening here to assign story point complexity, just the sprint planning the night before to prioritize the items to be served. All the work gets dumped on that one aspiring never-saying-no employee, our very own Agile Wife. While simple stories are worked on as a team in big companies and products going live in installments, Agile Wife prepares, sorry , develops, tests and pushes the product for go-live single handedly without a team. The stakeholders (family members) as well as the clients (guests/ relatives) do enjoy the high-quality defect-free product with lots of comments, the Agile wife quickly moves on to the next story at hand, single handedly. In a typical agile environment, there are different teams like developers, testers, POs and such, working towards one product to deliver to one or two stakeholders. Here the stakeholders are more in number whereas there is only a one woman team. Mind you, the Agile Wife doesn't take planned leaves or sick leaves so there is no capacity planning happening either. It's a one-woman agile team.

While we do have stakeholder-husband pitching in, I mean, teaming up with Agile Wife in different story points, a lot of lagging behind is still seen in high priority-high complexity stories such as cooking or taking care of the kids. Gradual increase in the task-owning and sharing is taking a slight load off of the Agile Wife but if you look at the graph (Imagine the graph here, it's plotted thin anyway!) it doesn't help much because these are happening for the working woman-Agile Wife category. If the Agile Wife doesn't have a career, or rather a job which warrants going to office, the Agile Wife is doomed to be Agile Wife for life and assumed that teaming is not necessary for their work at home.

Now I am not promoting equality in this particular post, all I am saying is, let's team up and promote local employment by providing jobs to cooks, by buying dish washers and develop our economy and so on. Before you say that a middle class Agile Wife has a washing machine and a maid to help her with the stories for the sprint, look at the lower middle class Agile Wife and the middle class Agile Wife who is an Agile Wife only and not an office-goer (includes those Agile Wives who do business and earn from home as the exception of having a maid or a helper is acceptable only for those who go to work outside of their house). 

After doing all of these, the Agile Wife doesn't get promoted or appraised or even recognized for the efforts and hard work put in. So I wonder the motivation for an Agile Wife to be one and to remain one for eons.....

Now imagine this Agile Wife's stakeholder-husband going to work in a company and doing the same, but with a big team and gets promoted for the work he supposedly did. Oh, well! 

Image from google