Some of the new popular software development processes are agile methods, which in general tend to be used in cases when we might have unpredictable requirements and changes from the client, so that the development team is constantly getting feedback from the client about the product. They try to implement a way of development that might be considered as new, which is done in incremental stages, where each incremental stage is prepared to get the opinion from the client about its development up to that point. As I was reading a really good essay that describes them, written by Martin Fawler, this part made me realize that we as humans, generally speaking, do not incorporate this into our own lives: Doing our best at every stage.
As Fawler says, “They should be fully integrated and as carefully tested as a final delivery,” referring to the intention of always building a product that though it might not be in its final phase, nonetheless when presented to the client, it should be carefully tested and taken care of fixing its issues as if it were to be a final product. We might learn this principle from agile methods, and start to apply this lesson into our lives. We might not be getting the results that we are after because usually we are not putting enough effort to do the best from our side. We are not doing our best in our work, and at the end of each work day, we feel like there is something wrong, because we are not content with the results that we get.
Trying to view each day as if it was our last can help us realize about the shortness of our lives and that we are not here for a long time. As a result, we should do our best at every incremental stage of our lives. We can consider increments as weeks, or months that should generally have some goals and results that we are after that can keep motivate us to keep going. Moreover, breaking our larger goals into smaller ones and doing our best while achieving each milestone towards our big goals might not just give us the results that we are after, but much more. We might then learn new lessons and rise our standards up to the point where something that we aspired to do is now a bottom line that we hate to go below it.
