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 feel a little slow to start a retrospective with a simple "What happened this sprint?" Read More
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 see that the directions indicate taking two pills. Would you take 20 pills in an attempt to make your headache go away 10 times faster? Read More
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 because the most obvious split turns out to be wrong. In this video from my 80/20 Product Backlog Refinement course, I explain why the obvious approach is wrong and what to do instead. Read More
Here's a short video I made in 2016 (hence the old Agile For All branding) about how my family uses an Agile approach for homeschool and chores: Read More
Last week, I tweeted, Working in thin vertical slices is the keystone habit for agile software development. It enables so many other good practices. — Richard Lawrence (@rslawrence) June 22, 2016 Read More
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 many things, you can become good enough as a facilitator in a short time...and you can spend your life refining your skills. For most ScrumMasters, internal agile coaches, or agile leaders, I recommend two resources to grow enough facilitation skill so that facilitating’s not your constraint. Read More
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 board to reflect some of those changes. Read More
We're often asked which day or days are best for scheduling the Sprint Planning, Review, and Retrospective meetings. Read More
Some 46 years ago, Melvin Conway wrote, "Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure." This idea is known as “Conway’s Law,” and the converse is known as “Reverse Conway’s Law.” It’s as true today as it was a half century ago. The basic idea is this: Your organizational structure drives a particular software architecture. And your software architecture drives a particular organizational structure. People who work closely together and communicate frequently will create software that reflects this and vice versa. This dynamic leads to one of the major points of friction for established organizations trying to become agile: Read More
The period from mid-December to early-January can be disruptive for an agile team. You're used to working on a regular cadence, maybe in 2-week iterations. Suddenly, there's an avalanche of company holidays and vacation time that throws off your velocity and cadence. Here are 3 ways you can make the end of the year a useful and productive time rather than a few weeks of frustration and waste. Read More