VW Camper road trip — an agile journey

I definitely love to go on vacation with my VW camper. And if you take a closer look, you can find some analogy to agile principles in software engineering.

My girlfriend and I start with limited resources and a starting budget: 2 people, 2 weeks, some simple camper add-ons, and more or less some money (not really limited or wasted upfront, but now and then monitored during our journey)

We have a rough idea of the direction and country we want to explore. There is no upfront exact planing. Instead, we keep in mind that we can change our plans every day if we want, or have to.

We try to experiment to get better in setting up the camper and everything else we need at the campside and take it down again. So preparing for moving from one place to another gets easier and can be done more often if we like to. Not that we need to change our place often, but we can easily.

We evaluate on a daily basis if the current situation (weather, events, our personal preferences) fits our demands, our needs, or if we have to leave.

We pay for what we get. There is no high investment for the future. Just refueling our camper to get to the next nice place, buying some wine for a romantic dinner at the campside or going for a walking tour in a city. Campsides even let you leave very flexible and you pay when you leave (at least during off season). If something unexpected happens and we have to abort our journey there is no money wasted.

In contrast to a preplanned journey by air to an all-inclusive club:

• Lots of upfront evaluation and planing — studying travel brochures, searching the internet for hours or spending a ton of time in travel agencies, compare prices, thinking and hoping that the place you get send to is as nice, clean and exciting as described in the brochures.
• You pay upfront and hope that in the end you get what you bought. You maybe even lower your expectations so that you are not disappointed.
• Hardly any chances to change your journey or correct your course during your vacation. And even if possible, those changes involve effort and costs.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to talk bad about this kind of vacation.
However, compared to a roadtrip, it is less flexible and much more planing and spending money upfront with high uncertainty if the beautiful journey you dreamed of and already paid for will also come true.

However, the flexibility you get with traveling by camper comes with some costs:

• You need to get feedback from yourselves and from your partner. And maybe you do not always agree with this feedback ;)
• You need to be disciplined with packaging, setting up the car for sleeping, …
• You need to plan and decide while you move. While my girlfriend and I enjoy this „where do we go next“, it could be annoying for people who „just want to stay and relax“ (oh yes, that is definitely also possible on a road trip!)

So what does this all have to do with Agile or DevOps?

When you look at the famous three ways of DevOps you will find some similarity:

1. Seek to increase flow and get rid of any obstacles: while our camper is not as fast as a plane, we try to increase flow when looking at packaging and unpackaging. Since we have lots of routine in this it works very smoothly when arriving and leaving the campsides. As a result it is no pain anymore to change our location more often. It is like doing continuous delivery.
2. Create feedback loop: we need to get feedback from each other to decide whether we should stay or we should go on, and where to go. Additionally we learned a lot during traveling what to take with us and which equipment is the right for us. We often talk about it what to improve the next time. It is like doing continuous observability.
3. Promote experiments: during a road trip there is lots of things you can try. Which kind of campsides do you like, which kind of towns, which things during day. There are a lot of decisions to made. Maybe the whole journey is an experiment.

Yes, going by plane is definitely faster than by camper if you would want to go from Vienna to Bogota. However, if you want to course correct your way and be flexible, a road trip with small but continuous steps is the right way for you.