Stephen D. Ritchie's Blog

There is a shift toward agent‑assisted and agent‑orchestrated coding. I’m not on the frontier, but I believe I can see it up ahead. I believe it works. And it seems to be accelerating.

The biggest increase is an individual engineer’s ability to leverage the tooling. They need to know how to:

Break work into well‑defined chunks,Review agent output rapidly, Make decisions quickly, and Manage lots of agents simultaneously.

Teams need to train on …

Structured task defini...

Automated Testing in the Age of AI

When I wrote about automated testing in “Pro .NET Best Practices,” the challenge was convincing teams to write tests at all. Today, the landscape has shifted dramatically. AI coding assistants can generate tests faster than most developers can write them manually. But this raises a critical question: if AI writes our code and AI writes our tests, who’s actually ensuring quality?

This isn’t a theoretical concern. I’m working with teams right now who are struggli...

Platform Engineering: The Strategic Practice Your Team Actually Needs

In previous posts, I discussed the concept of “ruthlessly helpful” practices, which are those that are practical, valuable, widely accepted, and provide clear archetypes to follow. Today, I want to apply this framework to one of the most significant developments in software engineering that have happened since I wrote “Pro .NET Best Practices”: platform engineering.

If you’re unfamiliar with the term, platform engineering is ...

When I titled my book Pro .NET Best Practices back in 2011, I wrestled with that word “best.” It’s a superlative that suggests there’s nothing better, no room for discussion, and no consideration of context. Over the years, I’ve watched teams struggle not because they lacked good practices, but because they blindly adopted “best practices” that weren’t right for their situation.

Today, as development teams face an overwhelming array of tools, frameworks, and methodologies, this challenge has onl...

Fadi Stephan and I presented our Back to the Future – A look back at Agile Engineering Practices and their Future with AI talk at AgileDC 2025. I think Back to the Future with AI is bit simpler.

In this blog post I explain what this talk is all about. The theme is to understand how AI is transforming the Agile engineering practices established decades ago.

Setting the Stage: From 2001 to 2025

The talk began by revisiting the origins of Agile in 2001 at Snowbird, Utah, when methodologies...

A very big thank you to AgileDC 2025 for hosting our presentation yesterday. Fadi Stephan and I gave a talk titled, “Back to the Future – A look back at Agile Engineering Practices and their Future with AI” offered our experience and perspective on a few important questions:

As a developer, if AI is writing the code, what’s my role?As a coach, are the technical practices I’ve been evangelizing for years still relevant?Do we still care about quality engineering?Do we still need to...

In Mark Winteringham’s latest book, “AI-Assisted Testing,” he offers a balanced guide to the future of software testing. Manning early access version: https://www.manning.com/books/ai-assisted-testing

The field of software testing is rapidly evolving, and the author conducts a thoughtful and practical exploration of how artificial intelligence (AI), particularly generative AI, can improve the testing landscape.

Mark Winteringham’s journey into software testing is somewhat unconventiona...

Dynamic analysis is a powerful technique in software development, aimed at gathering comprehensive information about a program’s behavior during execution. Unlike static analysis, which examines code without running it, dynamic analysis involves running the program under various conditions to collect data on performance, memory usage, code coverage, and internal states. This process provides invaluable insights into how the software interacts with its environment, making it an essential tool for...

I was interviewed me for the Lunch with Tech Leaders podcast on the topic of Crucial Skills That Make Engineers Successful. Check it out!

https://fast.wistia.net/embed/channel/1p3ghvfdgw?wchannelid=1p3ghvfdgw&wmediaid=xptfl5z1u1Episode 80: Crucial Skills That Make Engineers Successful

The other day I was speaking with an engineer and they asked me to describe the crucial skills that make engineers successful. I think this is an important topic.

In a world driven by technological innovation, the role of an engineer is more crucial than ever. Yet, what separates good engineers from successful ones isn’t just technical know-how; it involves a mastery of various practical and soft skills. Let’s explore these skills.

Cultivate Core Technical Skills

Problem Solving — E...