Asynchronous Agile 1:

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.
“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.

― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

Temporal Distribution in the World of Human Modulation

My goal here is to kick off some thought about ways Agile works within certain time constraints, and how it is hampered under a different set of time constraints. But my larger goal is to spur consideration about time as a resource. We’ll close by focusing on some ways to extend the benefits of Agile with concrete techniques to survive and even thrive outside the boundaries of the traditional work day.

Everyone in the IT/CS world is familiar with the Iron Triangle, and almost everyone has some familiarity with Agile SDLC. What the iron triangle, Agile, and even traditional waterfall project management techniques do, in essence, is to organize thought around input resources which create an output product. The resources may differ (bricks, people, lines of code) but they will almost always have two factors in common. (1) They are all modulated by a human. (2) They are all subject to the one overarching constraint – Time. We can look at any process as four essential types of resource: People, Knowledge, Materials, and Time. Developers (people) write code on computers (materials) using their programming language (knowledge) within a workday (time).