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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
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An Experiment Canvas

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

An Experiment Canvas
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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
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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.

Increase the value of your stand-ups with different questions.

Increase the value of your stand-ups with different questions.

I’ve recently started working with some teams who have elected to use the classic three questions during their stand-ups - “What did you do yesterday?”, “What will you do today?”, and “Are there any impediments in your way?”

I’ve been talking about and advocating for different stand-up formats for quite some time. I, frankly, think the three questions are too focused on individual activity and lack focus on group progress.

If you like the format of three questions, may I suggest you try some different questions?

Metrics and Scrum

Metrics and Scrum

So there we were, at an agile conference. Well, not at the conference exactly. But at a bar very near to an agile conference.

A few patrons were talking agile stuff - like they do. And someone, as evidence in support of their stance that all metrics are evil, used the “But the Scrum Guide”, defense.

“But the Scrum Guide doesn’t prescribe any metrics. As a matter of fact, the word metric is not in the Scrum Guide. Not once.”

I found this claim dubious, so I checked it out.

Refactoring: Introduce Parameter Object

A cluster of parameters often indicates an object in hiding. By creating a Parameter Object, you are making the code more flexible and you may discover a new object that was hiding in plain sight. In many cases, not only will you end up moving the parameters into a class, but you very well may discover that some of your code will move into the class as well. In this way, parameter clusters can be an indication we have a Single Responsibility Problem.

Agile is "the best"!

I was asked to answer the Quora question, “Why is the Agile model the best”.

I’m not comfortable with the notion of “best”. Maybe “better”, “leading”, or “fit for purpose”. But most of this is so contextual and ephemeral, I tend to avoid the label “best”. That nit-pick aside…

Agility focuses on working in teams together with the customer to deliver high-quality working software in rapid cycles.

Deadlines and Agility

I was recently asked to engage in a debate over whether or not there are deadlines in agile. There were a few folks involved in the debate and the predominant perspective seemed to be that true agile efforts have no external deadlines - all deadlines are self-imposed by the team in the form of an iteration commitment or a scope negotiation with the Product Owner.

This is bunk.

Comments rarely improve code

Comments rarely improve code

The debate over comments in code is ongoing. At least once per year for the last 30 years, I’ve been involved in a discussion on the subject - often accidentally and reluctantly. To be honest, my perspective has changed over time. I used to comment every method, I used to comment any line of code that was “weird”, and I used to comment any blocks of code that were too complicated. Today, I rarely comment, if ever. Over time, I’ve come to realize that most comments are unnecessary.