Life is good. Sit back, chill and let AI do its thing. And probably not in an office setting, but at the pool or on the beach. If this is the state of software engineering and coding, where AI is writing the code and engineers are relaxing, do we care about quality code and agile engineering…
AI coding tools promise unprecedented speed: prompt for a feature, receive complete implementations in minutes, ship faster than ever. The speed is compelling. Why spend hours writing a feature when AI can draft it in minutes? Because speed without validation creates more problems than it solves. The Hidden Cost of AI-Generated Code You prompt AI to…
As a product manager, you've probably heard your engineering team mention "technical debt" during sprint planning or retrospectives. Maybe they've pushed back on a feature request, citing the need to "pay down technical debt first." Or perhaps you've noticed that what used to take two weeks now takes six, and when you ask why, the answer…
Discover how AI transforms agile engineering practices like TDD, pair programming, and CI/CD in 2025. Learn which practices still matter and how developers adapt to AI-assisted development. In 2001, seventeen software industry leaders gathered at a ski resort in Utah to address their frustrations with software development. This was before smartphones, before cloud computing, and long…
Scrum is easy to understand but difficult to master. For a team to be successful with Scrum, developers have to learn new ways of working as well as adopt Agile Engineering practices. Building things iteratively and incrementality differs from traditional SDLC phased development. In addition, developers must apply new technical skills and techniques in to be…
Developers on Scrum teams split their time across 3 main areas each and every Sprint and should account for that in Sprint Planning. Building the Product Increment During the Sprint, Developers work on Product Backlog Items that help accomplish the Sprint Goal and deliver a Product Increment. Developers on a Scrum team build the Product Increment.…
Many teams adopt Scrum but still approach development the same old way. Build widget A in Sprint 1, build B in Sprint 2, and build C in Sprint 3, and in Sprint 4, we put A+B+C together. In Scrum, a Product Increment is whatever you previously built, plus anything new you built in this last Sprint…
Agile technical coaching is about helping teams adopt agile engineering practices that are essential to succeeding with Scrum. These practices help teams and organizations realize the benefits of Scrum, like faster time to market, faster return on investment, reduced risk, improved quality, and increased adaptiveness to be able to quickly respond to changing requirements and changing…
Agile engineering practices are foundational for successful Scrum implementation and ensuring your team consistently delivers a Product Increment at the end of every Sprint. In this guide, we'll walk through a practical 8-step approach to help your team adopt these essential practices and make them stick. Some steps you can facilitate yourself, while others may require…
Agile Engineering practices are not new. They originate from extreme programming back in the late 90s. XP specifically calls out these practices as things you should be doing. And here we are 20+ years later still trying to get teams to adopt them. Why is that? We do Scrum not XP People might find these practices…
Let’s take a look at the top 5 Agile Engineering practices that are essential to succeeding with Scrum and overcoming the struggles teams face trying to deliver a Product Increment at the end of each and every Sprint. Test Driven Development (TDD) TDD is a development practice where we start with a very small automated test…
Many teams struggle to deliver a Product Increment at the end of every Sprint. Here are the top 5 reasons why teams can't do that consistently: Lack of understanding of what a Product Increment is There is a general lack of understanding as to what a Product Increment is and how we build things iteratively and…
I typically see teams in one of 4 stages when adopting Agile practices. The Multi-Sprint Hand-Off Teams here are working in Sprints. 2 week Sprints. They have a requirements Sprint, a Design Sprint, a Coding Sprint and a Testing Sprint. This might be better than what they were doing before but it is still taking 8…
At the 2019 Global Scrum Gathering in Vienna and at AgileDC 2019 in Washington, DC, I presented on Test Driven Development. Below is the abstract of the talk, along with the presentation slides. AgileDC 2019 Abstract: Have you tried TDD? Do you hate it? Do you have a hard time applying it in practice? Do you…
Testing is everyone’s responsibility. The entire team works collectively to develop a quality product. Most of the automation is done by the people writing the code using an approach known as Test Driven Development or Test Driven Design (TDD). This includes unit, integration, component, and system tests. These tests verify that the application works as intended.…