I was reading an article about Elon Musk the other day. The article said something along the lines of ‘Whenever Elon works in a new field, he tries to apply knowledge he has gained from other fields into the current one’. That got me wondering about everything I have learnt so far about my current major Software Engineering.
Software Engineering is mainly about how software development and maintenance activities are carried out and how a company that is performing these activities can improve the quality of it’s products. Capability Maturity Model is a software oriented process assessment and improvement model. The main difference between CMM and CMMi (integrated) is that the CMMi framework is more generalized for fields other than software. Seeing how most people live their life in the moment without much planning, I began to wonder if any life-centric metrics could be used to improve planning and execution of daily activities. This could also help mitigate any ‘surprises’ or unplanned risks through proper risk management.
I spent very little time thinking about what kind of metrics could be used for ‘life’ and these are some of the metrics I came up with:
- Number of productive hours per day/week
- Number of chores per day/week
- Number of completed chores per/week
- Rate of completion of chores
- Hours spent on entertainment
- Hours spent on travelling
- Number of commutes per day/week
- Number of times the free hours per day have been stretched (metric for laziness I guess)
Maintaining such a list manually would be a lot of work but I think some of it could be automated using an application such as tracking commutes and time of travelling per day etc. At the end of each week, a summary of the metrics could help plan for the next week.
Could a week be considered an ‘iteration’? Perhaps iteration planning could be performed during the weekends? An overview of the iterations plan (or release plan) could be made at the beginning of each month?
Hmm….