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.
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.
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.
Michael Nygard tweeted
'The phrase "business value" seems to hide uncertainty behind vagueness. Can we just say "money" instead?'
I disagree. Or more accurately, I disagree with what I infer Michael means by this single tweet. I cannot say with any certainty what he meant, much less address the context of or inspiration behind his statement.
I've been on numerous Agile projects with varying methods for capturing stories. Quite popular (and purportedly the ThoughtWorks standard) is the "As a, I want, So that" story format.
While I have seen teams do well with this format, I think it can be radically improved with a minor change. I prefer to see "So that, as a, I want" story format.
My reasoning is quite simple; the emphasis is incorrect in the common story format.
Agile Rob posted a column a few days ago entitled, "If You Don’t Focus on Business Value, Don’t Adopt Agile." He tweeted it out and after reading it, I replied that I did not entirely agree. Rob asked that I post a comment on his blog. The following is an extended/modified version of that reply.
I read two articles today, "Adopting Agile Isn't The Point", by Mike Cottmeyer and "If You Don’t Focus on Business Value, Don’t Adopt Agile.", by Robert Dempsey. Rob's posting is an expression of agreement with Mike's.
