Agile processes are an obvious choice for development work within a business, but have traditionally not sat well when dealing with customers and contracts who like to specify detail, delivery and price before work starts. Negotiators and lawyers have no obvious answers to hand and, rather than take the risky route of creating a new agile contract, usually fall back to the apparent safety net of an implicit waterfall process.

If there were some example “agile” business contracts available, some of the risk for the contract negotiators might be removed.

InfoQ: Working Group Formed to Produce Reusable Agile Contracts

I’m currently working on some software which sends notifications to users (using SMS, email, or whatever) and have faced the inevitable problems with testing it. On balance I’d prefer not to receive a test SMS on my mobile phone every time our continuous integration system runs an end-to-end test.

Gojko Adzic has some thoughts about how to make such a system more straightforward to test.

Gojko Adzic » How to test e-mail notifications properly