5 Boring Things That Have a Bigger Impact Than AI Assistants on Dev Productivity

Summary

Here are 5 factors that make a bigger difference to software development outcomes than “A.I.” coding assistants, but teams don’t address because they’re “old news, granddad!” Smaller teams are better value/$ spent More frequent releases accelerate learning what has real value Limiting work in progress – solving one problem at a time – increases delivery throughput Cross-functional teams experience fewer bottlenecks and blockers than specialised teams Empowered, self-organising teams spend less time waiting for decisions and more time getting sh*t done Now, I appreciate that every one of these is a can of worms that many organisations simply do not wish to open. They all have deep implications, and require foundational changes not just to the way we work, but the way we think. For example, smaller, more frequent releases implies software’s in a shippable state more often, which implies faster build & test cycles… and down the rabbit hole we go: into testing pyramids and separation of concerns and micro-cycles with continuous testing, continuous integration, continuous code review and… Come to think of it, the stuff I teach 🙂 Another example, empowering teams requires a pretty high level of psychological safety. When people are afraid to fail, they’re afraid to try – to make calls, to take initiative, to just f-ing do it! The culture of an organisation, which may have evolved over many years, is a hard thing to reshape. There’s often a lot of unspoken rules – sure, you say your door is always open, but… It takes much work and many iterations to shift those underlying patterns in the way we interact. But waiting on the other side of that long journey is a high capability to rapidly and sustainably create and adapt working software that meets rapidly-changing business needs. Software agility Nirvana. We already know from the data (e.g., DORA) that “A.I.” coding assistants don’t unlock that door.