Richard Lawrence

Good user stories follow Bill Wake’s INVEST model. They’re Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable, Small, and Testable. The small requirement drives us to split large stories. But the stories after splitting still have to follow the model.

Many new agile teams attempt to split stories by architectural layer: one story for the UI, another for the database, etc. This may satisfy small, but it fails at independent and valuable.

Over my years with agile, I’ve discovered nine patterns for splitting user stories into good, smaller stories. Read on »

Bob Hartman and I are offering an Agile Product Management Boot Camp course March 9-10 in Denver. If you’re a product manager, product owner, business analyst or in any other product facing role in an agile (or soon-to-be agile) environment, this intense, hands-on course is a great opportunity for you to ensure that you’re helping your team maximize the value it delivers.

Read on for more details and a special 2-for-1 offer »

It’s officially a series now. In this Short Answers video, I answer the question, “If my Scrum team could work on one thing in 2009, what should it be?”

Watch the video »

The Chief Engineer role in the Toyota Product Development System combines parts of the Product Owner, ScrumMaster, and senior technical team member roles from Scrum. In addition to leading the technical design of a new product and facilitating the work of the other engineers, the CE must deeply understand and care about what the customer values—he has ultimate responsibility for delivering value to the customer and for the resulting commercial success or failure of the product.

CEs have gone to amazing lengths to gain that deep understanding of the customer’s needs.

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I’m hosting a free seminar on Tuesday, November 11 from 1:00-2:30 PM in the Denver Tech Center area. Please join me there and spread the word to others who might be interested.

Here’s a brief description:

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As the saying goes, “Cash is king.” It doesn’t matter how good your P&L or balance sheet looks or how good the business case for your project is, if you don’t have enough cash every month to pay the bills, you won’t stay in business.

With the economy tightening, then, companies are desperately trying to cut costs in order to stay cash flow positive. In IT the major cost is salary, so cutting costs means cutting people. Nobody likes that.

Fortunately, there’s a simple way to reduce expenses and increase returns on a software project: incremental releases.

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