Agile in 160 Billion Gallons: When Agile Principles Occur During A Disaster

While the Agile concepts may sometimes be easy, the why's and how's are a little trickier to wrap your head around. I’ve unfortunately participated in three recent rising flood water events in Houston over the last three years. Employing my agile skills has had a profound impact on the "success of the project". I will be mapping common Agile ideas to dealing with rising water encroaching on your home. I start with an interactive exercise where we talk about flooding, with the outcome being the question: “What do you do when you know that your house might flood?” The answer to this question is the “backlog” in agile terms. From there we introduce the “prioritized backlog”, like do you save things ranked by emotional value, functional value, or financial value? Other concepts like “iterations”, “definition of done”, and “retrospectives” follow suit. Newcomers and experts alike, will leave with a palpable, even visceral, connection to some frequent Agile concepts. An additional side benefit might even be for the attendees to begin to envision Agile applications outside of software development.