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
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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.

Remediating Technical Debt

I no longer believe we can return to the original, healthy and helpful definition of Technical Debt. Nor do I think we’re going to shift away from it to a better metaphor.

But maybe we can talk about remediation of Technical Debt in a way that helps us make better decisions.

The way I see it, Technical Debt Remediation is nothing more than Maintenance. Maintenance is to keep in an existing state (as of repair, efficiency, or validity) or to preserve from failure or decline.

Technical Debt Remediation (Maintenance) comes in different categories – Preventative, Deferred, and Repair.

The Experiment Canvas

In the past few years, we at OnBelay have had the honor of working with companies who are looking to improve their engineering culture.

One key tool we use today is the Experiment Canvas. My partner, Diane Zajac, and I co-developed the canvas. It is based heavily on our experience with A3s. It is still a work in progress, but I want to share with you where we are to date. Please feel free to use it and give us feedback.

Thoughts on Refactoring

Thoughts on Refactoring

I recently worked with a team on a fairly significant refactoring. I paired with different team members each day over a three day period as we moved code around, pushing responsibility into other classes, reducing complexity, and make the code more expressive. On the fourth day, I put together some notes on the things we saw and general guidelines for the team to keep in mind. Nothing herein is new to the community, but it might be new to you.

Delivering Value

A while back, Jason Yip, tweeted about delivery of value and started an interesting thread.

Much of the discussion was about the definition of “value”. Is it specifically about revenue generation or direct customer benefit? Is it more generally about any form of value such as revenue, progress, or learning?

Troubleshooting Velocity

Troubleshooting Velocity

Recently, on a private forum, a member posted a query about their team’s recent drop in Velocity. Concerned about how their boss would respond, this individual wanted to know how to troubleshoot velocity issues.

After spending over an hour crafting a response, I decided I would also add it to my public blogs in case there are others who have similar questions about velocity.

Velocity Anti-Patterns - Attempts to show increased velocity

Velocity Anti-Patterns - Attempts to show increased velocity

When leadership asks for an increase in velocity, there are a few common behaviors that occur. Each of them are an attempt to satisfy the potentially unrealistic ask.

It is intriguing to me how often a manager will make a change such as this to a system of work and then later proclaim that the team is gaming the system. This is simply not the case. In fact, the gaming of the system is the improper application of targets or goals for lagging indicators. The rest is just natural consequence.

You can find more on the topic of velocity and metrics for agile teams in my book, "Escape Velocity".

Velocity Anti-Patterns - Enticing More Velocity

Velocity Anti-Patterns - Enticing More Velocity

Leaders (and teams) attempt to achieve velocity increases in numerous ways. Most, as you can imagine, have unintended side effects on the teams and none significantly improve the actual flow/delivery of value to their customers. Here we explore a few ways teams might be encouraged to increase their velocity. Unfortunately, no matter how well intentioned, using such techniques still has a negative impact.

This content and more on agile metrics is available in the book, "Escape Velocity"

Velocity Anti-Patterns - Demand for higher velocity

Velocity Anti-Patterns - Demand for higher velocity

Demanding more velocity is far and away, the most common Velocity Anti-Pattern, and quite possibly the most harmful. It manifests itself in a number of differing fashions, but the basics are the same: Somebody determines that the team needs to get more done in less time. So they send out the message - “We are going to need more velocities.” This person is usually an authority figure and typically doesn’t do the actual work being asked of the team. And they clearly don’t know what velocity is. More velocities? Aw C’mon, really?

This content and more on agile metrics is available in the book, "Escape Velocity"

Velocity Anti-Patterns - Introduction

Velocity Anti-Patterns - Introduction

If you’ve been on an agile team that uses velocity as a key metric, you’ve probably experienced or at least witnessed some pretty strange behavior.

I asked a group of agile coaches and practitioners via Twitter and LinkedIn about dysfunctions they’ve seen on teams related to the use of velocity. I received plenty of responses that inspired head shaking and hand wringing. I pulled out the most commonly identified issues related to velocity and metrics and share them here.

You can find more on the topic of velocity and metrics for agile teams in my book, "Escape Velocity".