"Quite often these teams, especially Agile teams, seem obsessively focused on “Business Value”, but that’s in the context of personal relationships. “Business Value” is a shorthand, a way of keeping conversations from going astray, of keeping people focused. It is a term that signals or reminds of other things—it is not a thing in itself.

Increasingly these days, when I hear people theorizing about Agile and Lean, they are treating “Business Value” as a thing in itself. It is treated as an end, rather than as a means. (This is in keeping with the decline of Agile as a bottom-up team-oriented insurgency.)"

"There are some technical stories, though, which really do deliver something the business care about. You can find this out by asking, “Who cares if I don’t do this? Who cares if I don’t have an automated build? If I don’t write unit tests? If I don’t write acceptance tests?”

This is where the feature injection comes in. I’m flexing Chris Matts’s template a bit to do this; here’s how mine reads:

In order to

will need ."

"Architects, designers, and developers of corporate systems usually have little or no voice in what gets built, or how, or why. (Imagine the average IT department meeting where one developer says this system really ought to be built using Scala and Lift.) The don't sign on, they get assigned. I know that individual developers do care passionately about their work, but usually have no way to really make a difference.

The net result is that corporate software is software that nobody gives a shit about: not it's creators, not it's investors, and not it's users."