Code Cast 31 – Agile for Families
August 31st, 2009
This episode is a recording I made during my talk at the Agile 2009 conference in Chicago. The session, “Agile for Families, Iterating with Children”, was surprisingly popular. In addition to the slides and the audio, I am including a link to the IEEE paper that went along with this session. That’s right! There is an IEEE paper about Agile at home. Awesome 
The slides from the talk are available below. The slide deck I am posting here is a bit larger than the one used in the talk. These slides include some interviews with the Starr kids that were left out of the slides at the conference for time reasons.
This episode is less rocket surgery, and more brain science. I hope you enjoy the show.
New to agile but started a similar technique at home when the children were young. Now they are in Middle and High school and I have adjusted “incentives” to grades. Part of weekly jobs is printing last weeks grades. Bonuses for A’s and B’s, C’s minimal incentive (I call it Wal-Mart pay), D’s and F’s cost them serious cash. GREAT POST
Dave-
Awesome presentation!
How old were your kids when you started this…?
My youngest is 6** and I’m curious how the younger set do with the boards/rewards.
thanks!
-aaron
**ok, the *actual* youngest is 4 months. But her board is just “eat, poop, eat, smile, sleep”
I started one child at age 4 and it worked very well. We used pictures instead of words on the cards at that time. A 6 year old would have no problems what so ever.
Dave,
Thanks for posting. I enjoyed this presentation at Agile 2009. We’ve been trying a few things with our 4 year old from my ‘management theory’ background. I’m interested in seeing how these ideas integrate at home.
Anyone reading – this was one of the best presentations at Agile 2009. Fun, relevant, applicable. I recommend it even if you don’t have kids. You’ll still learn something and you might even be able to apply it to yourself!
A very entertaining pitch and a great example of applying agile and scrum to non-technical projects!
David,
This is impressive. It’s an excellent introduction to the concept of Agile.
Great podcast David. Is it just me, or does your pdf slide deck not render well? All the text is blacked out in Preview on my MacBook Pro.
@Michel Grootjans
I’m sorry for that, Michael. Is anyone else experienceing similar issues? I cannot repo this, but then, I am not running OSX.
I had my wife read the paper to see how she liked it. There were some general vocabulary questions (she doesn’t speak agile, but knows what a scrum board looks like).
In general she liked it. But I haven’t gotten her to run it past her stay-at-home mom group yet.
@David Starr Text is blacked out for me on OS X Preview. Renders in Adobe Reader, though.