The AI Velocity Trap: When 'Shipping Faster' Actually Means Delivering Less Value
How AI coding assistants create false productivity gains while teams unknowingly sacrifice code quality and business value.
How to maintain quality and velocity when AI assistants become part of your development workflow
Why development fundamentals become critical when AI assistants join your workflow – and how to avoid common integration pitfalls.
Your Retrospectives Aren't Working Because You're Measuring the Wrong Things
“Same issues, different sprint.” Does that resonate with your team? Your retrospectives dutifully identify problems, action items are meticulously recorded, and then… nothing fundamentally changes. The real issue often isn’…
The Productivity Paradox: Why Adding More Developers Slows Down Your Delivery
Despite expanding an engineering team and investing in advanced tools, delivery timelines worsened due to a misleading focus on individual productivity over system productivity. Increasing developer numbers led to communication overhead, dependency conflicts, and context switching. Shifting to flow-centric metrics improved collaboration and sustainable productivity, enabling faster, higher-quality delivery.
Welcome to the Age of tools
The post reflects on the evolution of software development, highlighting three key eras: the Age of Process, the Age of People, and the current Age of Tools. It emphasizes the importance of discipline and a balanced approach, combining people, processes, and tools, to navigate challenges and achieve high-quality software development effectively.
Timeboxing, Getting value out of Timeboxing beyond the methodology you use.
Timeboxing is a vital practice in Agile methodologies, enhancing productivity and predictability. It structures work within iteration-based frameworks like Scrum and XP, creating urgency and facilitating planning. In continuous methodologies like Kanban, it maintains focus and allows for efficient process improvements. Overall, timeboxing drives measurable outcomes and sustainable productivity across various environments.
The Problem with Long Deadlines
Extending deadlines in software projects often reduces productivity, as evidenced by the ‘Beginning, Middle, and End’ cycle. Adopting shorter two-week? iterations enhances focus, feedback value, and engagement, while maintaining a sense of urgency. This approach stabilizes team velocity and promotes effective breakdown of tasks, ultimately optimizing workflow and delivering quality outcomes.
Maintaining Efficient Progress Meetings
Progress meetings, or Daily Scrums, are essential for team progress and adaptability in software development. However, many teams fall into common traps, such as only reporting tasks instead of fostering collaboration. With remote work and dynamic team structures, it’s crucial to adapt these meetings to encourage open discussions, diverse participation, and effective communication.
Adding developers to an agile project disrupts Velocity: Brooks law re-interpreted
This post presents Brook’s law as a systemic issue, and how to interpret it for agile projects.
The Science Behind Planning Poker: Understanding the Theory That Makes It Work
Planning Poker has become the de facto estimation technique in agile teams. Like many agile practices, it elegantly packages theoretical concepts into a practical, easy-to-follow process. This post explores the hidden foundations of Planning Poker by combining three powerful ideas: measurement theory, research on cognitive anchoring effects, and the Delphi estimation technique. Understanding these underlying principles helps teams move beyond just following the process to truly mastering the art of collaborative estimation.