Agile Software Engineering

How does AI Coding impact agile practices?

See shaping up for product management and planning. Focus on two roles primary, customers and engineers.

Map Data Flow

Understand how data flows through a system, how it created, stored, what impacts it's change of state, and who/what needs to know about that.

• Flow of Information: For information to be valuable it must be timely and actionable.
• Flow of Progress: The smooth, uninterrupted advancement of a project. Principles include clear process logic, synchronization, and minimizing waste. Practical steps to achieve this include defining clear steps and responsibilities and coordinating tasks and timelines.
• Flow of Value: The flow of value focuses on delivering maximum value to the customer with minimal waste. This involves value stream mapping, lean principles, and continuous improvement. Strategies include implementing lean methodologies and regularly assessing and improving processes.

Mantra

Data is the new oil, and also must be clean to be valuable.

Build Teamwork

Culture is any organisation's most valuable asset.

• The competitive advantage comes from shipping ideas quickly and aggressively
• Everyone must be aligned in what success looks like to ship valuable products faster
• Managers must lead with actions by shipping quality producing code
• Managers serve the team rather than the other way around
• Simplify titles as specialization is a barrier to progress
• Invest in teamwork, teams that play together stick together
• Appraisals and coaching must be separated in manager-less teams
• Coaching should come from mentors outside the feature team

Evolve Understanding

Earn confidence by designing systems that capture wisdom as they scale.

1. Ask dumb questions. Ask a minimum number of "dumb" questions every day when you join a new team. It surfaces important issues others were too scared to ask about.
2. Learn git really well and don't learn a codebase through the code tab, start in the PR tab to see what is changing and why.
3. Build it, deploy it, then make it useful. Deploy code as soon as you make it before building out all the features. It makes debugging and learning much easier.
4. Aim for simplicity, simple architectures and designs tend to scale surprisingly well compared to starting with complex ones.
5. Interview a lot, you need to know your true market value by interviewing elsewhere frequently.