Doc Norton
Why I Joined Test Double

When I say I’m joining Test Double as their new VP of Delivery, I’m not just making a career move—I’m making an alignment move. This is a company that already values the things I value. They’ve built a strong culture, a strong team, and a strong set of practices. I’m not joining to overhaul anything. I’m joining to help make something great even better.

Why I Joined Test Double
Doc Norton
Collaboration Contracts beta release

Today, I’m excited to announce the beta launch of Collaboration Contracts, a lightweight app designed to help teams—especially distributed ones—quickly define and manage their roles in decisions. Whether you're using it to bring clarity to one-off decisions or baking it into how your team operates every day, the app is built to support alignment, accountability, and smoother collaboration.

Collaboration Contracts beta release
Doc Norton
An Experiment Canvas

The Experiment Canvas is a simple means of planning, tracking, and responding to your experiments.

An Experiment Canvas
Doc Norton
Create simple things in small steps

Simple Things

When I say simple, I don’t necessarily mean easy. And I certainly do not mean crude in form or incomplete. Simple indicates something that does not have superfluous parts or multiple responsibilities, is easy to understand, is as independent from the rest of the solution as possible, and meets a need as is.

Simple may not address all use cases, but it does address some use cases.

Create simple things in small steps
Doc Norton
The Behaviors

Over the past several years, as I’ve been helping teams and organizations improve their ability to deliver software products that are desirable, viable, and feasible, I have been experimenting with a Behavior Framework that has proven to be rather effective. And I’d like to share it with you in hopes that you find it useful and that you provide me feedback on your experiences with it.

Technical Debt and Accountability

Technical Debt and Accountability

I am wrapping up my second in a series for Clean Coders on Technical Debt. In the first episode, I explain the Technical Debt metaphor, how it originated, how it changed over time, and how it now is commonly understood in a way that is the opposite of what it originally meant. I talk a bit about the limitations of metaphors and how debt in particular has not served us well as a metaphor over time. So when a link to an article on the "Limits of the Technical Debt Analogy" hit my inbox this morning, I was quick to follow the link and see what the author had to say. 

Unfortunately, this article is not at all about the limitations of the metaphor. The article is about how people other than those who write the software are responsible for the quality of the software. This article is bunk.