Ask HN: Anyone run their family like an Agile team?
Anyone have daily standups to keep tabs on what their kids are learning? Use Jira to track progress on school work? Hold retros to have them reflect on how their learning or how projects/studying could have gone better?
10 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 39.6 ms ] threadI wouldn’t want to turn normal interactions with my kids into rigid interactions forced into agile format.
The purpose of standups is to go fast and not waste people’s time with friendly, casual conversation. Using that format to engage with your kids is the opposite of how you should be encouraging interactions. You want to get involved and encourage natural discussion.
Jira is useful for tracking things that you’re not involved in and giving reports to higher ups who want to drop in and see progress reports. Again, not the dynamic you want to use with kids.
Just interact with them like normal human beings. Show interest, ask questions, have conversation. Don’t take the things people loathe about forced workplace interactions and make that the dynamic of your family.
She says it's been helpful with teaching them how to get better at correctly estimating progress on stuff like summer break homework, studying for upcoming exams and also remembering what day the exam is on, reducing procrastination - at first the "story points" equivalent was wildly variable ranges, but started to get more accurate over time, being able to gauge what was a harder task than an easier task, for example if weaker on maths they aren't embarassed to outright say that and allocate more points/time toward their maths exam revision and dedicate less time to an essay due on the same week.
When writing an essay or studying for a concept they use the ticket/issue comment section to toss in their drafts, links to stuff they find that might be useful later, links to helpful YT/khanacademy videos, and it seems like an organiser of sorts, and the next day can just pick it up from there.
I was really weirded out at first but it didn't seem too absurd after knowing more about it and that it isn't just dinner standup - this is really clearly not making your kids send you an Outlook meeting request to speak to you, but more akin to keeping a journal or todo list, though I think it's going to be moved off Jira soon given the "everything cloud" push and that the $10 10-user licences no longer exist.
Thinking back you my childhood, my parents weren’t really involved in my education at all. I doubt they ever knew what classes I was taking. They never asked anything about my schooling at all. I was a pretty mediocre student as a result. Considering I eventually figured out how to learn on my own and do quite well in tech, I suspect I could’ve been a much better student.
So if I were to have a family of my own, I’d like to be much more heavily involved in their education than my parents were in mine. Agile/Scrum, for all its faults, can at least guarantee some level of transparency, accountability, and adaptability. If nothing else, it could train kids how to work at a tech company.