Ask A4A: Long-running Stories
Hi Richard, My Scrum team has been working on a particular service for over a year. It’s been 20+ Sprints. I’m concerned about the deliverables…
Author: Richard Lawrence
Longtime co-owner of Agile For All, Richard left in October 2020 to co-found Humanizing Work.
He trains and coaches people to collaborate more effectively with other people to solve complex, meaningful problems. He draws on a diverse background in software development, engineering, anthropology, and political science. Richard is a Scrum Alliance Certified Enterprise Coach and Certified Scrum Trainer, as well as a certified trainer of the accelerated learning method, Training from the Back of the Room. His book, Behavior-Driven Development with Cucumber, was published by Addison-Wesley in 2019 (for more information, visit bddwithcucumber.com).
Making Info Visible for Better Decisions
A key part of the ScrumMaster’s or Product Owner’s job is making information visible.* Whether that’s a product backlog, taskboard, cumulative flow diagram, or a…
Talking About Our Feelings—Potentially Awkward, Definitely Important
Last week, I described how to do the observation step of Focused Conversation without having to talk about all the details. At this point, many…
Ask A4A: When the Observation Part of Focused Conversation Gets Boring
The Focused Conversation method asks us to start with observations before assigning labels – good, bad, effective, worthwhile, motivating, etc. In real-life facilitation, it can…
MMFs: What they are and why they matter
Suppose you have a headache. A bad headache. “I’ll take Tylenol to make it go away,” you think. So, you grab the Tylenol bottle and…
Getting Good at Story Splitting
As I’ve said before, working in thin vertical slices is the key habit in Agile software development. Many people struggle to find vertical slices, but…
Why Most People Split Workflows Wrong
Workflows are a very common element of software. But they can be hard to split well when you’re trying to work in small, vertical slices…
How We Use Agile at Home
Here’s a short video about how my family uses an Agile approach for homeschool and chores:
Vertical Slices and Scale
Last week, I tweeted, Working in thin vertical slices is the keystone habit for agile software development. It enables so many other good practices. —…
80/20 Facilitation (or, all the study on facilitation most people need)
In response to my recent post on developing your skills in 2016, several people mentioned facilitation as a skill they want to grow. As with…
Humanizing Work First-Time Participant Guide
Humanizing Work 2016 is just 6 weeks away, and we want to help you prepare to have a great experience there. Beyond the basic info…
Developing Your Skills in 2016
You’ve probably heard that it takes 10,000 hours to master something. That notion, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers, isn’t quite accurate—Gladwell has…
New to Agile? Build trust to grow influence and impact
Transforming the way you work to an Agile approach has implications for the relationship between software teams and their customers and stakeholders. But in many…
80/20 Product Ownership Updates
A few updates on 80/20 Product Ownership, my online course that teaches you how to slice your work at every level of detail to get…
5 Key Skills Great Product Owners Have
Being Product Owner is hard. Actually, that’s not quite true. Anybody can make a list of things to build, call it a backlog, and bring…
MHA 2015 Slides: Resistance to Change Doesn’t Exist
Thanks to everyone who attended my Mile High Agile 2015 session, “Resistance to Change Doesn’t Exist.” Here are the slides and handouts:
Splitting Stories in Chinese (or, 用户故事切分招数)
Thanks to Bob Jiang for the translation (with feedback from Evelyn Tian and Daniel Teng). This poster is also available in English, French, German, Russian,…
Why You’ll Want to Attend Humanizing Work 2015
Every year, we put on a conference just for agile practitioners who’ve been in one of our classes. Check out this 90 second video to…
Agile Homeschool Update
Last year, I wrote about how we use an agile approach for homeschool. Since then, we’ve refined our approach. This school year, we updated our…
Cynefin and Story Splitting
As I was preparing for my Agile Denver session on Unscaling, which leaned heavily on the Cynefin Framework, I reread Liz Keogh’s excellent post, “Cynefin…