Luca Minudel's Blog

Productivity impact: fluctuating from -20% to +20%

Some studied show an AI-assisted coding productivity gain of 20%. One is the Google study (*). 
Others show a loss of 20%. One is the METR study (**).
The METR study interestingly reveals a ‘perception gap’: many developers while slowed down, still believe they are more  productive.

The 50% gains estimated or some economists and AI experts, and the x10 gains mentioned by some AI enthusiasts, are still to be captured by any study.

This leaves ...

The world of AI-assisted coding is fast-moving, changing and evolving. Every week, new models, tools, and IDEs are released, making every knowledge and practice temporary.

The entire field of AI-assisted coding itself is in its infancy. Our understanding of how to use AI coding assistants effectively is constantly evolving. There is much more to discover and learn, than what we know already. What we know today will become obsolete relatively quickly.

The only certainty in this phase is chang...

With LLMs being non-deterministic and our natural tendency to anthropomorphise them, it’s easy to see cause and effect between the approach used and the outcome, even when there is none.
Pareidolia in action?

That is why it is important to keep experimenting with different heuristics, apply critical thinking, and find out what really works for you, in context.

Take the heuristics listed below as potential experiments you can try out, or inspirations to come up with your own heuristics.

A) 1 goa...

Common misunderstandings

This is a collection of common misunderstandings found in many companies adopting Agile, fuelled by some large consultancy company and some practitioners’ mistakes.

Agile Theatre (AKA performative Agile voided of the key elements that make things work better)Post: https://www.smharter.com/blog/2021/12/13/same-words-different-meanings/Linked-In post for comments and interactions: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/lucaminudel_am-i-missing-something-important-here...

This page is a compendium of the book:
– [ENG] The forgotten new philosophy of work, management & leadership
and its previous editions
– [ENG] Succeed over difficult problems by embracing Complexity-Thinking
– [ITA] Domina i problemi difficili abbracciando il Complexity-Thinking

Online channels

NYC Complexity Lounge hosted by Barbara Frontera and Jocko Selberg
– Website with links to the meetup and video channel

The Prometheus Project hosted by Tom Bohinc
– Website with links to the videos an...

Manifesto co-author Jim Highsmith described the trajectory of Agile adoption from the 2001–2004 Rogue teams, 2005–2010 Courageous Executive, and 2011–2021 Digital Transformation.

Real Options and Feature Injection creator, and BDD contributor Chris Matts, described the changes of sentiment toward Agile through the bell curve of the Diffusion of Innovation, from the age of innovators to the crossing of the chasm, up to the laggards.

Book author Daniel Mezick put the spotlight on the exploitative Ag...

Why discuss the state of Agile

Agile Software Development is the only modern way of working whose effectiveness has been proven on the ground: in the early noughties it turned the tide on the dismal record of medium to large-size software development projects. Today many successful big-tech companies (see here) that excel in organisational, technical and business Agility use practices stemming from the lightweight methods that came together under the umbrella of the Manifesto for Agile Softwa...

PART ONEThis is the rule of thumb

In the context of knowledge work and software & digital products development, the rule of thumb is to share all the responsibilities inside a multi-disciplinary team that has all the skills and authority to autonomously do all the work from the concept to when the finished work lands into the hands of the final users, and later for operating, supporting, maintaining and evolving the related product. Therefore, all the responsibilities should remain inside...

PART ONE

See also the previous post describing how to make Agile cross-team collaboration frictionless and enjoyable or in one word effective: Agile Cross-Team Collaboration How-Tos.

Acknowledgements

My gratitude goes to Bas Vodde (co-author of Scaling Lean & Agile Development and Practices for Scaling Lean & Agile Development, and co-creator of LeSS) for engaging in a long and detailed conversation on this topic.

What is Shared work

Before Agile went mainstream and the fo...

PART ONEAcknowledgements

Thanks to those that contributed to this post, reviewed it and made suggestions for improving it:
Jon Kern (co-author of the Agile Manifesto), Matthew Skelton (co-author of Team Topologies), Mark Dalgarno (Agile conferences organiser, Agile professional), Carlo Beschi (Agile professional), Carlo Volpi (Sr Programme Manager), Luca Cicale (Senior Application Architect and Developer).

Summary

This post explores why Agile cross-team collaboration is fun...